On Wednesday, 12 November 2014 at 15:57:18 UTC, Nick Treleaven wrote:
I think Rust's lifetimes would be a huge change if ported to D. In Rust user types often need annotations as well as function parameters. People tend to want Rust's guarantees without the limitations. I think D does need some kind of scope attribute verification, but we need to throw out some of the guarantees Rust makes to get an appropriate fit for existing D code.
Rust is not the first language going that road. The problem is that you get great complexity if you don't want to be too limiting in what you can do. This complexity ultimately ends up costing more than what you gain. I think the sane road to go into is supporting ownership/burrowing for common cases, and fallback on the GC, or unsafe construct for the rest. One have to admit there is no silver bullet, and shoehorning everything in the same solution is not gonna work.
