Future of DMD 1.xxx

Bill Baxter dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com
Tue Sep 4 05:20:20 PDT 2007


Lutger wrote:
> Simen Haugen wrote:
>> "Bill Baxter" <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote in message 
>> news:fbj50b$2dd2$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> I've been meaning to ask...
>>> Am I right in thinking that basically nothing from WalterAndrei.pdf 
>>> will be going into a DMD 1.xxx version?
>>>
>>> If so, that's a bummer because some of the upstream libraries aren't 
>>> on D2.0, and the maintainers have stated that they're not going to 
>>> port to 2.0 "until the 2.0 design is pretty conclusively settled", or 
>>> "until it is near to release".
>>>
>>> --bb
> 
> But if these features would get in 1.0, the whole stable vs unstable 
> branch would be undone (could just as well merge back), and D will start 
> to be all moving target again. We can't live on the bleeding edge and 
> have stability at the same time. 

Well, I was never one of those advocating that the language needed to 
stop changing.  But I do think a branch that maintains backwards 
compatibility is good.  As long as old code compiles with the new 
compiler it's ok in my book.  I even don't mind some small 
incompatibilities like 'ref' becoming a keyword.  I want to be able to 
use the new features like struct inheritance and macros, even if more 
conservative libraries stay away from them.

But in any event it's probably too much work for Walter to backport such 
features to 1.x anyway.  Would just mean 2.0 would take that much longer 
to reach stability.

--bb



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