Do we need a time-out in D evolution?

[Clay Smith]

eao197 Wrote:

> I'm watching for discussions 'Stepping back and looking at constness from  
> another angle' here and 'resizeable arrays: T[new]' & 'preparing for  
> const, final, and invariant' in digitalmars.D.announce and I'm sad. I  
> occasionally locked to D may be from 2003 -- it was a constantly changing  
> language. At the end of 2006 I thought that D is stable enough to start to  
> use it. And in Jan 2007 the v.1.000 went out. I thought that in near time  
> D would have only bug fix releases and it is a time when various tools for  
> D (like libraries and IDEs) would be produced.
> 
> But I was wrong.
> 
> What we have now? The language which keeps their evolution. Lack of  
> libraries, lack of tools, lack of documentation (books and tutorials). As  
> a consequence -- lack of users. And we don't get much new users and new  
> applications without new libraries/tools/documentation.
> 
> As a programmer I need a stable language. A language in which I can write  
> a domain-specific library and forget about its maintenace for three of  
> five years (as for some of my C++ libraries those I wrote in 2002-2003). I  
> need to write applications and because of that I need a quality and stable  
> compiler, a quality and stable standard library, and quality third party  
> libraries. And third party libraries' writters need a stable tools too.
> 
> But now, when I'm writting some D code, I know that in near feature the  
> next D version will be here. And that version broke my code because of  
> consts and new syntax of resizeable arrays. So why to start a new big  
> project on D if its codebase will be obsolete in few months?
> 
> And I'm affraid that after adding consts/final/invariant support to D the  
> language keeps their envolution :(
> 
> Yes consts/final/invariant is a great addition to the language. But D now  
> is very powerful language. It is now more powerful than C++0x will be. So  
> may be it is better to stop add new features and make a stable platform  
> for library/tools writters at first and then for applications writters?  
> AFAIK, every successful languages were going such way -- the good initial  
> release and some new releases later with years of stability beetwen them.  
> And I'm affraid that C++0x will be here before D would get a stable  
> language with enough libraries and tools.
> 
> May be it is better to concentrate on improvement of the current  
> implementation (fast precise GC instead of the current conservative GC,  
> for example) instead of introducing incompatible changes in the language?
> 
> And my main question is: will be D a constanly changing language or will  
> be there some time-outs in its evolution?
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Yauheni Akhotnikau

D 1.0 is locked, the features you are talking about are D 2.0 features.