Tango vs Phobos

[Walter Bright]

Benji Smith wrote:
> Robert Fraser wrote:
>> D1 is definitely not dead. LLVMDC only supports D1 and is soon to come
>> out. Dil... I'm not sure how alive it is, but that's D1-only, too. 
>> Most D projects/libraries right now are D1-only.
> 
> Sure, that's the case now.
> 
> But imagine yourself back in 1997, supporting Java 1.0 but (for whatever 
> reason) not wanting to jump into Java 1.1.

When you ship a Java application, you are reliant on it running on the 
customer's Java VM that is not under your control. If they don't have a 
Java 1.1 VM, your application doesn't work.

The situation is different with a native compiler, because the customer 
doesn't need anything beyond the target machine/OS to run the 
application. Furthermore, you can continue to build those executables, 
regardless of future changes to the compiler, by simply saving a copy of 
the needed compiler.

Even if you didn't save a copy of the compiler, all the various shipped 
versions of dmd are freely available on the Digital Mars site.