1.0 ??

[Don Clugston]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Don Clugston wrote:
>> I think that's an excellent idea. If, as Walter has said, "1.0" is an 
>> arbitrary line in the sand, tying it to a particular date gives a 
>> rationale for associating a name to a particular release. If we can 
>> say "a DMD 1.0 release will exist on January 1, 2007" (or at least, 
>> 1.0 RC 1), we'd gain a lot of focus.
>>
>> I thought we were really close to a 1.0 release at 0.166, but starting 
>> with the array literals in 0.167, a stable release suddenly seems a 
>> very long way off.
>> On the positive side, I think that array literals and variadic 
>> templates were the two major 2.0 features which were likely to render 
>> a lot of library code obselete.
>>
>> We should choose a date and stick to it. Remove the angst.
> 
> Sounds good to me, and Jan 1, 2007 is a great date to pick.
> 
> I've been playing a lot with the template tuple thing. It flings open 
> some doors pretty wide to a great simplification of library code. That's 
> why I put a priority on it. I've been fiddling with some of Andrei 
> Alexandrescu's Loki C++ template code, and some of it shrinks by an 
> *order of magnitude* with language support for tuples. Not only that, it 
> becomes much more understandable <g>.

And consequently less buggy. In an early release of Loki, there was a 
typo which meant there was a nasty bug if tuples had exactly 27 parameters.

0.173 is an incredible release. We're getting frightening close to being 
able to say "D templates are a superset of the C++ template *wishlist*" <g>.

> Another goal of mine is support for a Spirit-like library. I used to 
> think Spirit was of only marginal use, but I am more and more thinking 
> that, from the right point of view, it can be core to making some 
> ubiquitous and very powerful library tools.

I have a vague intuition that template tuples will enable some serious 
innovation in that direction. It scares me at the same time, because 
there's *so much* unexplored territory.