MiniD 2 Plans

[Jarrett Billingsley]

MiniD 2 has been under development for over a year now, and I think it's 
finally almost ready!  It ended up taking a lot longer than I expected, 
mostly because I got the wild idea to reimplement the whole thing back in 
May.  Until now, it has been in alpha, but I think I'm ready to call it 
_beta_.  Wooo.

Currently there are a few reasons why I'm calling it beta.  They are:

- The binding library is not complete.  It wraps free functions, and that's 
about it.

- There are a few code generation bugs in the compiler (well not "bugs" but 
"fairly big changes") that need to happen.

- There are some additions to the standard library that I feel are 
important.

- The new implementation has not been tested to any appreciable degree.

- I'd really, really like to get shared libraries in for the release.  I 
think DDL is mature enough, I just have to sit down with it.  One issue 
though is Linux, since DDL doesn't yet (?) load ELF, so I don't know if it's 
actually possible right now.

- I want to decide whether the 'int' type should be platform-dependent or 
always 64-bit.

Once those things are sorted out, I think it'll be ready to go gold.  When 
will this be?  I hate making promises about this sort of thing because 
things always seem to come up and eat my time.  The first month and a half 
of school was absolute hell; the calm now only makes me dread how busy it'll 
probably be again in November.  But if I stick to it I think I can get MiniD 
2 to release quality in few weeks or so.  I know, development doesn't move 
nearly as quickly as when I'm out of school.

Once 2.0 is released, though, I plan on making many more maintenance 
releases to MD2 than I did with MD1.  Standard library additions, 
non-breaking language additions, bugfixes (obviously), native API additions 
etc.  The binding library in particular may be very basic upon release and 
would be improved afterwards.

What does this mean for 1.0?  I think it's time to put the thing to rest. 
It's outdated and the implementation is subpar.  MiniD 2 is superior to it 
in almost every way.  As of now, MiniD 1 is no longer being supported.  It 
will be moved into a branch of the SVN repository and MiniD 2 will become 
trunk.

I think that's everything that needs to be said for now.  And as always, the 
main page is at http://www.dsource.org/projects/minid, and the forums are at 
http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=94.