The ensloppification of D is a grave mistake

[solidstate1991]

Setting aside artists' concerns about genAI automating away part 
of the human experience, setting aside environmental issues such 
as water and electricity usage, setting aside social issues such 
as the accessibility of creating propaganda in large amount, even 
setting aside issues from code quality, which all will drive away 
potential users from the D ecosystem, there's still one issue: 
licensing.

GenAI models has been trained on the internet. They tried to vet 
it, yet again and again things are slipping through the cracks. 
This means code that licensed GPL is in the training material, 
and sometimes it can resemble the original code very closely, see 
the FreeBSD exFAT driver, that was a bit less stable regeneration 
of the Linux exFAT driver hacked onto FreeBSD. Even worse is, 
that on the internet, we have both "source code viewable" type 
solutions, and source code that has been acquired through dubious 
means, to be then shared illegally without the consent of the 
original writers.

On one hand, this creates a legal minefield for us, possibly 
forcing us into a lawsuit, or to relicense Phobos, ending with 
relicensing every later D applications. On the other hand, it can 
help to erode the social contract around open source.

Even if we get over these issues, there's the problem of code 
quality. Sometimes vibe coded applications pass basic safety 
checks, but then real-life tests prove those otherwise, and the 
code is overinflated with extra lines and extra unnecessary 
tricks. Sure, it might amaze the intended audience, business 
people who either invest or were told they'd be the next 
generation of programmers, but in the long-run, it will just 
result with extra lines. GenAI code also led to an epidemic of 
"library slop": libraries created just because someone could, not 
because of someone needed them. Every time I thought of making a 
new library, I checked what's available rather than diving deep 
into making them myself. Now the new standard is making 
everything yourself just because it's more trendy that way.

I therefore demand to stop adopting LLM usage for the development 
of the standard library at least, but I would be extra thankful 
if the D Language Foundation could do a 180 degree turn on LLM 
adoption. As a heads up on that front: the Rust community tries 
its best to hide the language's adoption of core functional 
programming features as defaults, and now they try to market them 
as "common sense features" to distance themselves from the issues 
the functional programming paradigm might cause in some 
instances, such as in game development, no matter how much toxic 
positivity does the Rust community spread about the language and 
Bevy. At this moment, it would be easy to do so.

I understand it. I born in the nineties, and I had some family 
members who got afraid I might get addicted to this fancy new toy 
called "computer" to the point that after a while, I won't be 
satisfied by GTA or Doom, but by getting a machine gun from the 
black market, then shoot up my school. Others were concerned, 
that corporations might drop computers, because "they like to 
crash constantly". Yet others were concerned that I might be 
secretly a sports star, and the computer is the reason why I 
don't give it a real try. But I also remember the countless 
technologies that did not get adapted by the end, at least to the 
degree some people wanted. And there are also technologies being 
trashed solely because something fancier-looking exists, such as 
physical media.

I don't want to leave, but things might force me to do so. Every 
other alternative, thanks to the success of Rust, is OCaml with 
curly braces for scope delimiting. D even lets me to have two 
kinds of memory management at once, while all other languages try 
to limit themselves to a few select tools, and force their users 
to follow "best practices" like functional programming. I also 
fear, that this will on-par with the disaster of D1 vs. D2 and 
Phobos vs. Tango.

signed: László Szerémi / ShapeshiftingLizard / ZILtoid1991 ( 
ziltoid1991 at proton.me )