Greenwashing

[Max Haughton]

On Wednesday, 27 May 2020 at 11:37:17 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> From https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greenwashing.asp, the 
> top Google search result:
>
> Greenwashing is the process of conveying a false impression or 
> providing misleading information about how a company's products 
> are more environmentally sound. Greenwashing is considered an 
> unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that 
> a company's products are environmentally friendly.
>
> Paraphrasing for our context:
>
> Greenwashing is the process of conveying a false impression or 
> providing misleading information about how a codebase is more 
> memory-safe. Greenwashing is considered an unsubstantiated 
> claim to deceive readers into believing that a codebase is 
> memory-safe.
>
> If this is greenwashing, then DIP 1028 is doing it.

I think you're right - unless D has a thorough, rigorously 
specified static analysis this will be the case (At zero cost, at 
least).

The current efforts to add that seem like they go in the right 
direction, but I feel like they'll have to have a breaking 
semantic/syntax change at some point (e.g. the way rust handles 
references seems much more decidable).

FWIW: There's need to be a thorough design first, the current 
approach to safety seems to spread among dmd like an octopuses 
tentacles. However, talk is cheap so I'm not complaining about 
what we have so far.