Tango vs Phobos

[Bruno Medeiros]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

The issue is not just about outdated VMs, or outdated compilers. If you 
are developing an application that uses third-party libraries (which is 
very common in web-apps, and other big enterprise software), and those 
libraries require a newer version of your language, you will feel quite 
compelled to upgrade to the newer version in order to use that 
libraries. And eventually, if most libraries only support version X of 
the language, almost all software ends up using version X, and then 
version X-1 might become effectively dead (and that's something that 
could happen to D1).

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Developer, MSc. in CS/E graduate
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D