[OT] Evolving Scala

[Derek Fawcus]

On Tuesday, 25 March 2025 at 11:54:45 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Monday, 24 March 2025 at 18:27:04 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:
>> D's unwillingness to break anything is killing the language. 
>> Not even Walter can push changes through. As came up in the 
>> YouTube video discussion, you can't compile .h files because a 
>> few people aren't willing to change their build process to add 
>> another flag. Scala won't have that problem.
>
> I thought the issue was that the change by itself would break 
> code. Some people had proposed a switch that could control the 
> priority of how the .h files would be imported, but the idea of 
> a switch kind of got dropped, never agreed on and never 
> implemented.

 From reading history, it seemed that the original form broke 
stuff in e.g. GCC because there were auto generated .h files 
being imported in preference to .d files.

Then Iain proposed a two pass approach, and apparently Walter 
didn't like it for performance reasons.  Then the idea of fixing 
this died a death.  There was also mention of allowing the 
functionality under a different syntax, but it seemed to peter 
out, or possibly be ignored,

Personally, the performance argument carries no weight for me - 
it is about functionality.

It just struck me that the different grammar approach, using 
something which would not compile now, and so would not break 
backward compatibility should be the obvious way forward.

However that (for some reason) was not pursued, and so in effect 
the whole ImportC while being a very good idea, has ended up 
(IMHO) with a half baked implementation, to the point of not 
being practical except in toy demonstrations.