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Comment by Animats

The lack of use cases in that document is a concern. They're all "nice to have" features, but is the payoff there for real work? The "effects" section mentions properties useful for a proof system. But it's not part of a proof system. If it were, most of those could be found automatically by static analysis, without bothering the programmer. (I was doing that decades ago in a very early proof of correctness system.) Getting programmers to annotate items is tough. Just getting C++ programmers to use "const" enough is hard.

"View types" are interesting. But how much of that generality is really needed? We already have it for arrays, with "split_at_mut" and its friends. That's a library function which uses "unsafe" but exports a safe interface. The compiler will already let you pass two different fields of a struct as "&mut". That covers the two most pressing cases.

parent Animats 8 months ago

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