Yes!

That is only one of the reasons to have that ability.

Almost more important is automated reasoning about very large codebases.

What are the global properties?

Where are the "antipatterns" of use and can we fix them?

Can we "lint" away large classes of defects?

Even Stroustrup believes such tools would be useful for C++.


On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 5:53 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
On 6/12/14, 10:40 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
On 6/10/2014 12:35 PM, justme wrote:
On Wednesday, 4 June 2014 at 06:13:39 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Of possible interest.
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/278twt/panel_systems_programming_in_2014_and_beyond/



Andrei

IMHO, the coolest thing was when Rob Pike told about the tool they made
for automatically upgrading user source code to their next language
version.

That should be quite easy to implement now in D, and once done, would
give much needed room for breaking changes we feel should be done. Pike
seemed to be extremely satisfied they did it.

Personally, I wouldn't be comfortable trusting such a tool. Besides, I
find that upgrading a codebase to a newer language version is one of the
most trivial tasks I ever face in software development - even in D.

It's a cute trick, but not a worthwhile use of development resources.

I very much think the opposite, drawing from many years of hacking into large codebases. I'm completely with Rob here. On a large codebase, even the slightest manual or semi-manual change is painstaking to plan and execute, and almost always suffers of human errors.

I got convinced a dfix tool would be a strategic component of D's offering going forward.


Andrei




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