DMD 2.000 alpha release

[Daniel Keep]

eao197 wrote:
> <old-talk>
> Some time ago I waited for D 1.0. Now I'm awaiting D 2.0. Then, I'm
> afraid, I would wait for next major stable version of D. There ins't any
> sign that after almost seven years of development D will became stable
> and mature language.
> 
> Excuse me for repeating that.
> </old-talk>

So use D 1.0--it's stable now!  As Walter has said, it's just going to
be maintained with bugfixes now, no more moving target.

If your argument is "I can't use D 1.0 because D 2.0 exists", then I
suspect you won't be happy until D has ceased all evolution and updates,
effectively dying, at which point you'll probably start using a
different, shinier language.

Sometimes you've just got to draw a line in the sand and not step across
it.  The game I'm currently writing will, despite how much I want to use
D 2.0, be written in D 1.0 because it's now a fixed target, and has
libraries and tools working with it.  Yes, it's tearing me up inside not
having shiny new const, but getting the game written and working is more
important to me right now.

>> This is going to save me plenty of memory costs (imagine, no longer
>> .dup'ing lots of strings and other arrays just to play it safe against
>> silly end users modifying what they shouldn't) not to mention
>> debugging headaches.
> 
> How do you plain to reduce count of .dup's in D 2.0?

I believe what Chris is talking about is that if you want an array (or
any other reference type, for that matter) that is absolutely guaranteed
not to change on you, you currently need to .dup the whole thing every
single time.

With D 2.0, it will be possible to overload functions to accept an
invariant reference, which we don't need to dup, making the code more
efficient.

	-- Daniel