Editions Ideas

[jmh530]

On Saturday, 13 December 2025 at 14:41:52 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Saturday, 13 December 2025 at 04:18:08 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
> wrote:
>> Regardless, in the DLF meeting this morning, it was decided 
>> that we're not going to be going forward with DIP 1000 as it 
>> stands. Walter acknowledged that too many folks would consider 
>> the explicit attributes it requires to be unacceptable. Now, 
>> he wants to look into using full program analysis to infer 
>> them instead of having an explicit scope attributes be used 
>> for it.
>
> So, in other words, we are still moving forward with the 
> overall design of DIP 1000, but we are reworking the 
> implementation to be more effective.
>
> I do not think this is the right course of action. I think DIP 
> 1000 should be torn out of the language completely, root and 
> branch. I am happy to write up my thoughts on this at length if 
> anyone is interested in reading them.

I’d be interested in reading them.

I’ve written some DIP1000 aware code and it was a bit painful, 
but I appreciated the effort into thinking about memory safety 
without GC.

My take is generally that D gets into trouble with half-baked 
ideas that aren’t fully expressive, but are chosen to avoid 
breaking code. Something like editions gives the freedom to 
choose a better foundation.

All else equal, I would recommend trying to more closely follow 
what Rust has done, particularly with respect to lifetimes, since 
that has traction in the marketplace. I also have found the 
arguments for an isolated type to be strong.