DIP1000 observation

[Donald Charles Allen]

On Monday, 2 September 2024 at 09:48:44 UTC, Nick Treleaven wrote:
> 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.

While I think it is beside the point, I agree with you about 
Rust's mutability restrictions. They assume everything you write 
is multi-threaded. There is no way, other than using "unsafe", to 
say to the compiler "just relax -- this code is single-threaded".

What Rust does or does not do is not relevant to turning D into a 
language that is incomprehensible except to lawyers, which is 
what appears to be happening.