Language issues

Like any programming language, D is not perfect. This page lists some potential problems that have been brought up and debated throughout the language's history. Fixing these is not straight-forward or may not justify breaking backwards-compatibility. As of the moment of writing this, there are no plans for a major revision of D which would allow such breaking changes, but this list may also be useful for other programming languages which wish to learn from D's experience.

See also: Language design discussions

Properties

Design of properties has been an oft-discussed topic. This language feature has evolved throughout D's history (e.g. the addition and removal of the -property switch. There are numerous DIPs with proposals on improving the design:

• DIP4
• DIP5
• DIP6
• DIP21
• DIP23
• DIP24
• DIP26
• DIP28

See also:

• Property Discussion Wrap-up
• Language design discussions#Properties

Unicode and ranges

D's ranges currently treat strings in a special way: they present them as a range of code points, thus implicitly performing UTF decoding. Algorithms that do not require working with decoded code points, and which would gain a performance advantage by treating the input as a range of code units (or an array of code units), must incorporate D strings as a special case. This approach complicates the implementation by some degree, and only solves a certain subset of problems for a subset of written languages.

See also:

• Element type of string ranges
• March 2014 discussion

Signed/unsigned comparisons

(What's the status of this? Issue 259 is open and has an open pull request.)

Null References

{Please add summary}

See also:

• February 2014 discussion
• September 2012 discussion
• Issue 4595 - [tdpl Accessing non-static member of a null reference compiles]