D 1.076 and 2.061 release

[Pierre Rouleau]

On 13-01-06 9:35 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday, January 06, 2013 21:15:43 Pierre Rouleau wrote:
>> So, given that enhancements are identified in Bugzilla, is there a
>> review process?  Are ticket priorities and vote used?  Who decides what
>> is the priority of an enhancement?   Who assigns them?
>
> There's pretty much never any assigning of issues in D's developement.
> Developers work on whatever they feel like working on. An enhancement request
> gets implemented, because someone decided to put the time in to implement it.
> If it's controversial, then it'll generally get discussed in the newsgroup,
> though some of that is likely to take place in the bug report itself or in a
> pull request if the developer implements it without discussing it first. Large
> language changes always get major discussions, but we also don't get a lot of
> those at this point. It's mostly little stuff.
>
>> Also, given that view on the development of D, what is the position on
>> the evolution of the language in context with backward compatibility and
>> stability?
>
> We're trying to reach the point where you can count on your code compiling for
> years without changing it. We're getting there, but it doens't always happen.
> Even fixing bugs breaks code when code relies on buggy behavior. There's also
> still some API changes in Phobos which breaks stuff, but we've been cutting
> back on those and trying to avoid them, so they happen much less now then they
> used to. The recent change to make deprecated warn instead of giving an error
> should help with that.
>
>> How can an organization of D users that are not also D
>> developers can plan a project and use D for it?
>>
>> Do you consider D stable enough for outside users/organizations to start
>> using it in their own projects?
>
> It's stable enough as long as you're continually working on your code. If you
> let it sit for a long period of time, you're likely to need the same compiler
> and library version that you used when you last worked on it. Breakages are
> _far_ fewer than they used to be, but they still happen. I'd expect that
> anyone using D seriously for professional development would stick to one
> version of the compiler for a while and then upgrade it when they have time to
> update their code (which they may not need to do, but it's still not quite to
> the point that there isn't at least a decent chance that a few lines of code
> will have to be changed).
>
> API breakage does occur sometimes, but we're making an effort to keep that to a
> minumum, and we'd like to get rid of it completely. But regardless, I believe
> that most breakages at this point are due to bug fixes, so when we'll reach the
> point that you can really expect your code to continue to compile for years on
> newer compilers without trouble, I don't know. That may depend primarily on
> the bugs that we have left and how well regressions get caught. The work
> that's currently being done on formalizing and ironing out the release process
> should help with that though.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>
Thank you for the info!

-- 
/Pierre Rouleau