Coming Soon: Stable D Releases!

[Don Clugston]

On 16/07/12 09:51, Adam Wilson wrote:
> As a result of the D Versioning thread, we have decided to create a new
> organization on Github called dlang-stable. This organization will be
> responsible for maintaining stable releases of DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos.
>
> So what is a stable release?
> A stable release is a complete build of DMD, DRuntime, and Phobos that
> ONLY includes the latest bug-fixes and non-breaking enhancements to
> existing features. It will not include, new features, breaking
> enhancements, and any other code that the core development team may be
> working on.

I'm not actually sure what this means. I fear that it may be motivated 
by an inaccurate assessment of the current situation.

The existing instability comes almost entirely from Phobos, not from the 
compiler. Historically there have been very few instances where you 
might want to choose an older compiler in preference to the latest release.

As I've said before, the one time when a language change caused 
*massive* instability was in the attempt to move AAs from language to 
library -- even though that wasn't even supposed to affect existing code 
in any way. The other thing that typically causes regressions is fixes 
to forward-reference bugs.

Historically, addition of new language features has NOT caused 
instability. What has been true is that features have been added to the 
compiler before they were really usable, but they have not broken 
existing code. Fairly obviously the 64 bit compiler was quite buggy when 
initially released. But even that massive change wasn't much more buggy 
than the library AAs! So I am not sure that you can correctly guess 
where instability will come from.

In summary -- I would not expect your stable DMD to be very different 
from the normal DMD. Phobos is where the instability issue is.