DIP1000 observation

[Nick Treleaven]

On Sunday, 1 September 2024 at 20:42:14 UTC, Donald Charles Allen 
wrote:
> But it makes no sense to me to try to turn D into Rust, because 
> you don't have the luxury of starting with a blank sheet of 
> paper as the Rust project did. D's multiple memory-management 
> methods, some inherited from C, make it inherently 
> memory-unsafe, so trying to provide memory-safety guarantees is 
> very difficult and will almost certainly make a mess of the 
> language. Section 20.24 says to me that a start has been made 
> on that mess.

Safe Rust is too restrictive about mutability.
DIP1000 is about extending the amount of code that can be @safe. 
DIP1000 removes restrictions.

> I think the D project should focus on increasing the distance 
> between D and C/C++ and forget about competing with Rust. Those 
> who want guaranteed memory-safety are likely to just use Rust.

D supports GC, so heap allocation does not have to restrict safe 
operations. DIP1000 shows you can often use safe pointers to 
stack memory without Rust's mutability restrictions.