Hmm - about manifest/enum

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Michiel Helvensteijn wrote:

>>> At first I really liked the D specs. The explicit contracts / invariants
>>> / unittests, the useful template possibilities, the variadic functions,
>>> to name a few. But right now D seems far too unstable and convoluted for
>>> me. It's already past version 1, well into 2 and already planning for 3.
>>> Not so much fixing and stabilizing (or, you know, standardizing) the
>>> existing language as adding more and more features. I'm glad I have
>>> something as reliable as C++ to work with.
>> 
>> As has been pointed out, the versioning of D is a bigger problem than
>> stability itself as it is confusing. 1.0xx is stable, 2.0xx is not (and I
>> have no idea how the version is meant to look when it becomes stable).
> 
> Hm.. Yes. I might have a look at 1.0xx again. However, what's the point if
> I have to switch to 2.0xx (or whatever the stable equivalent is) in a year
> and have to rewrite all my 1.0xx code? The good thing about the
> development of C++ is that:
> 
> 1. It is standardized.
> 2. For every new version, changes are painstakingly examined to make sure
> they break as little existing code as possible.
> 

That is good for broad acceptance, but it is also among the reasons for why
C++ has gotten a bad reputation in many places. It just picks up more
cruft :)

As for D, the D 1.0 marker was very artificial, and so it is far from
perfect, but still very good (and after being around D for a while, very
relaxing to not have to change on every compiler release). That 2.0 may be
marked as stable within a year may become a problem though, since it will
have improved immensely upon 1.0 and for many projects an upgrade will be
hard to avoid (I know we in Tango land have some expectations).

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource, #d.tango & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango