C is Brittle D is Plastic

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 04/04/2026 6:27 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> I agree with everything you wrote, except:
> 
>> The worst part about D’s strings are auto-decoding
> 
> That's a Phobos-only feature, and will be dumped for the next Phobos.
> 
>> and that literals include a secret zero past the end without you 
>> asking for it.
> 
> I think it's quite nice! It makes using string literals assigned to 
> pointers (or implicitly converted to pointers) work seamlessly with C.
> 
> Also,
> 
> ```d
> pragma(msg,"hello".length);
> 
> immutable string abc = "hello";
> pragma(msg, abc.length);
> ```
> prints:
> 
> 5Lu
> 5LU
> 
> How is it a problem?

Prefix string interning, can't optimize the text segment so only one 
copy of a given sequence of bytes is present.

As in: AB, ABC, ABCD
Only needs ABCD in text segment.

Whereas: AB\0, ABC\0, ABCD\0
Can't be optimized down to just ABCD\0.

Idk how much that matters, but that was the argument.