stability

[Robert Fraser]

Denton Cockburn wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 10:16:08 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> Denton Cockburn wrote:
>>> [quoted text muted]
>> D 1.0 regularly gets bug fixes with the focus on improving its stability.
> 
> I understand that, but there are still many outstanding bugs in D 1.0.
> 2.0 now, which is in development, a lot of the changes affect things
> elsewhere.  Are you going to correct all of those side-effects before
> releasing 2.0? or are they going to be addressed during the development of
> 3.0?
> 
> I was reading a thread on reddit a few days ago about issues people have
> with their favourite language.  One of the issues with D was that people
> were still running into compiler errors and bugs in what is
> expected to be a systems programming language.

Agreed. I would never even consider D suitable for a production 
application. I think the problem, though, is that Walter is working a ll 
alone (basically) on the compiler, and the GDC team is just playing 
catch-up using the same front-end. I just read about dil, which looks 
interesting, but it doesn't seem to be getting anywhere fast. D needs a 
community compiler, with an open frontend & backend, where a large group 
canf ocus on fixing bugs & maintaining stability. Or an expensive 
corporate-backed compiler, I'd expect the same quality from that.

Not to diss on Walter - you're doing a great job - but writing a 
compiler for a language as complex as D is not a one-man task.