On 18/09/11 5:08 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 09/18/2011 03:48 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Quite interesting.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/kikut/think_in_go_gos_alternative_to_the/
2 hours ago, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> The problem is, Vector was just an example of a multitude of
containers. The huge problem with slices is dogfood-related - they are >
"magic" because the language features proposed to programmers were not
enough for expressing a simple abstraction. Reserving "special" features
for the language is a terrible way to go about programming language design.
Don't D arrays do a similar thing? They are not templates, yet work with
generic element types.
Yes. As I understand, Andrei prefers things in libraries and Walter
prefers things built in to the compiler (obviously an
oversimplification, but I believe that's the general way they 'lean').
There's advantages to both. Being implementable in a library means that
they can easily be swapped out or modified to work with other code, but
being built-in ("magic", as Andrei puts it) means that the compiler has
greater awareness of them and can do better optimizations, give better
errors etc.
Of course, there are ways of extending the language to provide better
errors and allow better optimizations (e.g. 'pure' in D), but as a
purely practical matter, it's easier if they are just built-in.
Afaics, improving the language to the point were dynamic array-like
structures could be implemented in the library without resulting in a
bloated executable would be quite involved.
I don't think you'd get much bloat in D by implementing dynamic arrays
with templates. Remember, the built-in arrays *are* mostly implemented
in D: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/tree/master/src/rt
