Walter Bright:
D has writefln which does not have printf's issues. There's no reason to add a feature for printf.
The feature we are talking about is not just for D writeln, as I've tried to explain several times.
And D writeln is not verified at compile-time, this is silly for a language that tries to be reliable. (Rust printing function is actually a macro and it verifies the formatting string at compile-time when possible. That's the only good enough option for me for a modern statically compiled language).
When I look at my code,
As the designer of the language you have to look at code written by other people too! Because your D code is probably very different from mine. Take a look at Haskell code, Rust code, Erlang code, and learn new idioms and new paradigms. In the long run this will help D more than fixing a couple more bugs.
it is very rare that I pass arguments to functions that would benefit from compile time checking.
To me this happens. It doesn't happen all the time. As usual it's not easy to quantify the frequency of such cases. (On the other hand your "very rare" is unsupported by statistical evidence as well. Your judgement is probably better than mine, of course and I respect your opinions).
For those that might, there's always a rethinking of the feature, such as with printf/writefln.
I regard D writefln as currently _broken_. D has static typing, templates and compile time execution, and yet such things are not used enough in one of the most common functions, the one to print on the console. Now even GCC catches many of those printf usage bugs at compile-time.
The desire for some compile-time enforcement of some contracts is not replaced by rethinking.
Bye, bearophile
