On 2/27/2020 12:27 AM, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:
I'm well aware that allocation is inevitable if we want this behavior. My
argument is that this behavior is so ubiquitous that not following it would be
surprising to much more people, than if D didn't follow C's Usual Arithmetic
Conversions rules. For example, Rust not following those conversion rules is
considered a good thing,
Rust does not follow C syntax at all, so nobody will reasonably expect it to
have C semantics. D does follow it, it's a feature, so people will have
expectations.
while if D decided to be different than all other
languages w.r.t. string interpolation,
You can make it behave like all those other languages simply with:
f(format("hello $a"));
and there it is. But having it generate a GC allocated string is not so easy to
unwind, i.e. it'll be useless with printf and generate unacceptable garbage with
writefln. The extra string will always make it slow. Essentially, it'll be
crippled. Making D behave like a scripting language will yield scripting
performance.
D is a language built up from simple, orthogonal parts (or at least that is a
goal). A language built from larger indivisible parts is much, much less
user-adaptable. An example of this is the built-in associative array, which has
a series of fairly intractable problems as a result. Another example is the
built-in complex type in D, which turned out to be a bad idea - a much better
one is building it as a library type.
