On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 11:14 PM Oliver Hunt wrote:
>
> No one can provide meaningful feedback to a proposal if there is no proposal.


It's funny, I've been on this mailing list a few years but only in the
last few days did I realise something. . .

After I finished high school, I went to study electronic engineering .
. . these were my kind of people . . . stripping wires in the lab and
hooking up 555 timers to 7-segment-display encoders. Blowing the fuses
in our ammeter once in a while.

Then I went to go live in Asia for a while . . . and later I came back
home and went to study computer science. These were __not__ my kind of
people.

It's funny, even though my strongest suit in electronics was always my
programming skills, I still aligned much more to the stereotypical
personality of an engineer.

I think most of you folk on this mailing list are 'computer
scientists'. You want stuff written down -- This should do This, That
should do That. But I think an engineer -- I'm speaking
stereotypically of course -- would much prefer a working prototype to
play around with and come back and ask questions later.

In my own mind -- and yes I realise that I speak about one unique mind
-- what I've give you all so far is more than enough to get talking
about this. You have my original paper, you have Arthur's blog which
is decent, and for the love of the sweet mother of divine Jesus Christ
and the twelve apostles, I've given you a full working prototype. You
can literally go on GodBolt and play around with my new compiler
feature.

Oliver I know we've been back and forth a few times, and as I've said
to you I'm trying to accept with equanimity the contrast in our
personalities, but sometimes I'm left thinking, "Why does this guy
need the blatantly-obvious written down in black and white all the
time when the code is very clear?". I mean I think my GodBolt link
tells ya nearly everything you need to know -- you can edit the code a
little, see what it does, add another base class and come back to me
with "I notice it does X, but shouldn't it do Y instead?" -- that
would open up discussion.


> And voila you’ve just made the list useless for people who are willing to actually do the work you are at this point intentionally refusing to do.


I'm preparing a paper on "std::chimeric_ptr" but I want more
discussion on it first -- particularly I want to disassemble Thiago's
argument that it's only use is to compensate for bad programming. I
want to unravel that before putting a lot of work into writing
something that I might disagree with later.