On 9/15/14, 8:07 AM, bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
Again, it's become obvious that a category of users will simply refuse
to use a GC, either for the right or the wrong reasons. We must make D
eminently usable for them.
Is adding reference counted strings to D going to add a significant
amount of complexity for the programmers?
Time will tell, but I don't think so.
As usual your judgement is better than mine, but surely the increase in
complexity of D language and its usage must be considered in this
rcstring discussion. So far I have not seen this point discussed enough
in this thread.
Increasing the standard library with good artifacts is important. So is
making it more generic by (in this case) expanding the kinds of strings
it supports.
D is currently quite complex, so I prefer enhancements that simplify the
code (like tuples), or that make it safer (this mostly means type system
improvements, like eprovably correct tracking of memory areas and
lifetimes, or stricter types for array indexes, or better means to
detect errors at compile-times with more compile-time introspection for
function/ctor arguments), or features that have a limited scope and
don't increase the general code complexity much (like the partial type
inference patch created by Kenji).
I think most people exclude the library when discussing the complexity
of a language.
Andrei
