The forked elephant in the room

[Walter Bright]

On 1/27/2024 8:20 PM, FairEnough wrote:
> A feature pulled in, essentially without any community involvement at the time, 
> has resulted in 317+ bugs being summitted, and in addition, peoples time 
> (perhaps mostly yours) spent resolving at least 274 of them.

Those issues were about ImportC, not the rest of the compiler. As compilers go, 
this is a remarkably small number.

As for the time, it is mine to spend as I see fit. Nobody is paying me.


> And you're justification is.. "ImportC is not a language change, and so did not 
> require a DIP."

Phobos additions don't require a DIP. Code gen improvements do not. Dub does 
not. C++ header file generation did not. Druntime changes do not. Build system 
does not. Infrastructure does not. Web site changes do not. And so on. Only 
language changes involve a DIP.


> As a developer in the team at my business, if you had done this, then you would 
> have been promptly shown the door.

I've done bootleg projects at the companies I've worked at. They were all 
eventually mainlined into the official products.


> btw. None of the above is a comment about the usefulness of ImportC, or not.

It's fair to consider the result. ImportC elicited more or less no interest from 
anybody. I expected that. Over time, though, its detractors who have tried it 
have found it to be a game-changing time saver. ImportC is a huge win for D.

I've implemented a C compiler before, and knew ImportC was going to work. In 
fact, it worked much better than I anticipated.


> It's about the impact of change that was never presented to the community before 
> it got pulled.

As a proposal, it was not. As a prototype, it was, it just was pulled shortly 
thereafter.


> And those that pulled it are as much to blame.

The fellow that pulled it, Atila, is the author of dpp, a program to import C 
headers to D. Atila understood the potential of ImportC, probably better than 
anyone else.


> Would such a thing still occur today? (that is a question I don't know the 
> answer to).

I thought many times about doing an ImportC++, but ran away screaming. Maybe 
ImportCwithClasses :-)