DMD 2.066 Alpha

[Kapps via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 12 June 2014 at 18:25:36 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
> On 6/12/14, 6:34 AM, Dicebot wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 11 June 2014 at 02:01:24 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
>>> Please do not tag anything until we decide if "virtual" is a 
>>> keyword
>>> in D.
>>>
>>> See: 
>>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dlang.org/pull/584
>>
>> It was decided and 100% certain - "virtual" is not going in. 
>> Need to
>> remove it from DMD before this release is out.
>
> Yes please. -- Andrei

That's pretty disappointing. Something similar to virtual is
necessary, and that something should be actually clean, readable,
and obvious. The proposed final(false), while it is generic, is
long and ugly, a double negative (not not overridable), and not
nicely readable / obvious. Best of all, it's simply another
important thing that continues to never see any progress as it
gets further ignored.

The actual pull to add virtual had multiple pings, but the only
response after being told that it was coming (along with
final-by-default), was that it wouldn't be in 2.065 because that
was a bug fix release. Three months later (after 2.065 came out)
it actually got pulled, but this was only because someone else
pulled it, at which point you expressed your disappointment at it
being pulled. Then the issue again continued to be ignored for
another 3.5 months after that while the keyword remained in git
master the entire time. There's always talk of making things
actually happen and that the community needing to step up to make
them happen, yet people *have* stepped up to do all of this and
been continually ignored. Even after being told final-by-default
would not happen, it was (I believe?) said that a way of going
virtual -> final would be added, allowing people to actually use
'final:'. But again, nothing came from that.

We went from agreeing on final by default, to *possibly* getting
an ugly way of going from final: -> virtual, provided that
something is actually done about it instead of it being ignored
further. It's been over a year since the original discussion of
final by default, and agreement that *something* should be done,
but in the past year absolutely nothing has happened related to
it and no signs exist of anything happening in the next year
either.