Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[Chris]

On Thursday, 25 April 2019 at 17:12:55 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
>
> It would be great if you can provide constructive feedback with 
> detailed points we can work on.
> What issues do you have while updating dmd version? What is 
> poorly implemented in your opinion?
>
> If you help us, we can help you.
>
> Kind regards
> Andre

See, this is a common pattern here too. There are so many things 
wrong with D that one does not know where to start, but when you 
criticize the language or rather its management, you are asked 
(under the guise of "constructive criticism") to provide a 
detailed list of things to be fixed. This ain't but a smoke 
screen, nobody can do that. Its only purpose is to make the 
poster look bad and incompetent. Indeed, there are some poor 
souls who actually take the bait and make PRs or compile a list 
of bugs / errors etc....and then nothing happens.

I really don't remember all the errors and warnings I got with 
dmd updates over the years (including third party libraries). 
However, I have raised points about string handling and 
autodecode here several times, but to no avail (go and search for 
it), I ain't gonna repeat that. Just one thing: for several dmd 
versions I had to use "-allinst", else my code wouldn't compile. 
Then all of a sudden, my code wouldn't compile with "-allinst" 
and it was only on a hunch that I removed the flag from dub.json. 
WTF? What's the story with those weird semi-constructors without 
semi-destructors? Don't tell me that nobody could foresee that 
(hello: constructor/deconstructor). What about autodecode? The 
thing is that D doesn't even get the basics right. It has to be 
rewritten from scratch, same as a script you hacked together and 
that turned into something bigger. Take the good bits, but 
rewrite it in a clean way.