Last DMD made me truly breathless -- for the wrong reasons

[Georg Wrede]

My experiences last night


I've been doing production work in D for some six months now. Therefore 
I have been a bit reluctant to actually download the latest versions for 
testing, we've settled on 0.166 on Linux, and want to stay with it for 
some time past D 1.0.

Yesterday I couldn't resist, so I installed .174 on my w2k laptop -- and 
I was in for a major jolt:

Idly browsing dmd/bin I found that one of the exes actually had an icon. 
So I double-clicked it, and guess what, a simple wysiwyg GUI editor pops 
up! Wow, now we can make simple GUI apps right out of the box! And I 
found a small and nice text editor already configured for D there, too!

How come I've missed the buzz? Well, I guess D development is really 
putting on an exponential speed. Hoy contenders, resistance is futile!

Some research this morning revealed the day-after: I must have 
downloaded DFL in the spring and forgotten to erase the dm and dmd 
hierarchies before unzipping. Oh well, it's the small things, like always.


Some observations

While I actually believed I was using this "shrink-wrap-DMD", I had 
several different feelings about it:

  - wow, D is leaping forward -- where will we be in six months?!!
  - unfair to only provide GUI stuff for Windows
  - later it felt ok, since most D users are on Windows anyway
  - Walter's really out to impress the crap out of folks

After my bitter fall to ground, I felt:

  - why not?
  - some freebies in there make it feel polished, and "bigger"
  - ok, it's not Eclipse, but it could be touted as "a largish example"
  - OTOH, it must be awkward for Digital Mars:
     - quality issues
     - rights issues
     - the hassle, maintenance, support...
     - uncertainty about continued support from the app authors
     - upgrades syncing, especially waiting for the apps to catch up!
     - fighting with folks about who's stuff to include


Things learned

Obviously Walter can't be burdened with all this. So, what's left?
IMHO, we could re-examine the idea about there being "D distros".

We could have a few distros, each trying to be more user friendly, more 
outa-the-zip usable, and later distros for specific things, like games 
development, office stuff development, systems stuff, etc. If Linux 
seems to prosper with it, then I see no reason why D couldn't.

The DMD license could deny charging for such distros. At the same time 
the text would recommend contacting DM, "for very reasonable deals" on 
for-profit distribution, including book-sleeve CDs.

This way Walter could concentrate on exactly what he's doing right now, 
and what he's better at than anybody else: rocketing D to places where 
no language has gone!