C is Brittle D is Plastic

[Kapendev]

On Friday, 3 April 2026 at 12:20:19 UTC, Quirin Schroll wrote:
> The worst part about D’s strings are auto-decoding and that 
> literals include a secret zero past the end without you asking 
> for it.
>
> About the last thing, maybe in the next Edition, we can have 
> `""z` strings that request a secret zero and only add the zero 
> if a non-z string is used to initialize an  `immutable(char)*` 
> or `const(char)*` (or make it an error to omit the `z` in that 
> case). That would allow for some compression to be done by the 
> compiler: If you have strings in your code like `"BC"` and 
> `"ABCD"`, it could just re-use segment. With the secret zero, 
> it can only re-use suffixes.

It should be the other way around if that ever becomes a thing. 
The defaults being safe with a zero at the end and the unsafe 
version requiring an explicit symbol thing.