On Sunday, 1 March 2015 at 11:30:52 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
Actually, Kenji fearlessly deals with some of the hardest bugs
in the compiler that require a deep understanding of how the
compiler works and how it is supposed to work. He rarely does
trivia. I regard Kenji's contributions as invaluable to the
community.
But my point was that probably there are even better things
that Kenji can do in part of the time he works on D.
I think this once again brings up the issue of what might be
called "The Experimental Space" (for which std.experimental is
the only official acknowledgment thus far).
Simply put, there are things which it would be nice to try out,
which can be conditionally pre-approved depending on how they
work in real life. There are a lot of things which would be great
to have, if only some field testing could verify that they aren't
laden with show-stopping flaws. But these represent a whole
"middle ground" between pre-approved, and rejected. The middle
ground is fraught with tradeoffs -- most prominently that if the
field testers find the code useful it becomes the de facto
standard *even if* fatal flaws are discovered in the design. Yet
if you tell people honestly, "this may not be the final design,"
a lot fewer people will be willing to test it. The Experimental
Space must have a whole different philosophy about what it is --
the promises you make, or more accurately don't make, and the
courage you have to reject a bad design even when it is already
being used in real-world code.
Basically, the experimental space must claim "tentatively
approved for D, pending field testing" -- and it must
courageously stick to that claim. That might give Kenji the
motivation to implement some interesting new approaches to old
problems, knowing that even if in the final analysis they fail,
they will at least get a chance to prove themselves first.
(Maybe there aren't really that many candidates for this approach
anyway, but I thought the idea should be articulated at least.)
