Do we need a time-out in D evolution?

[gareis]

Oliver Dick wrote:
> eao197 schrieb:
>> Because of that must be some moment when Walter say: "We stop adding 
>> new features. Now we take two or three years of language stability and 
>> see what happens here". 
> 
> I totally agree. Beside of the fact that support for const is really an 
> important language feature, I think it's necessary to stop the evolution 
> at some point.

Not to stop it -- just to move on to things that won't break existing 
code. For example, C# and Java didn't get generics anywhere near their 
initial releases; Java got generics in 1.5 and C# in 2.0. But that was a 
pure addition in each case.

I'd like to see aspect-oriented programming and reflection in D on par 
with that of C#. (Now that I see Flectioned, std.traits, and TypeInfo, I 
think it'd be possible to come up with a Rhino Mocks equivalent for D, 
if there's a way to get function names. That still leaves AOP.) But even 
if these are left behind until a 3.0 release, that's fine. All existing 
code would still work.

I suppose we'll eventually just replace evolution with aggregation.

> With version 1.0 released in Jan 2007 I started to take a closer look at 
> D and considered to use it for production code. But the upcoming months 
> showed that the following 1.xxx releases weren't just maintenance 
> releases but constantly introduced new language features.
> 
> There is no roadmap on the website - no plans to create a standard for D 
> - it seemed to me that it was nothing more than a playground to try out 
> cool language features. And therefore not ready for production code yet.
> 
> I hope I'm wrong, since D is the language I've always searched for.

At some point, if the language doesn't stabilize, people using D will 
just settle on a particular version to use for production code. Then 
it'll be a matter of switching to gdc since it'll get bugfixes and the 
sort of improvements that don't break existing code.

Though I think that, the sooner there's a stable consensus, the more 
likely it is that D will have a respectable role in production 
environments. Currently, all my friends who program mock me over my use 
of the language.

I suppose using D would be much more of an issue for me if I were 
writing code that required more than the standard library. D has been 
around since 1998, I believe, and is able to link with C code, yet it 
still has very few libraries available.