An extolment for Walter

[Yigal Chripun]

Jesse Phillips wrote:
> I wish to express my gratitude towards Walter for his reluctance for 
> change. While there are many times that he does finally make changes he 
> was hardily against, "Shown the light" you might say. I believe that he 
> should not only be applauded for putting up with some of the attacks 
> toward him, but that this stone wall helps to clearly define the problem.
> 
> With such strong views coming from both ends, ideas build on each other 
> to provide what could be a much better solution. We still have yet to 
> really see what has come out from the Const stuff, however without such 
> great opposition to it some serious problems my not have been resolved. 
> Many are still unsure of this new direction and there is go reason to be.
> 
> I do not wish to say that Walter is alway correct in his standings, only 
> that it provides a very good buffer to stupid changes that would result 
> in later removal and rabid feature growth that does not need to be there. 
> And I believe even those that become frustrated trying to get a change 
> across no matter how trivial it seems do agree on the benefits from 
> having such a barrier.

while I completely agree with the goal of:
<qoute>
 provide a very good buffer to stupid changes that would result
 in later removal and rabid feature growth that does not need to be
 there.
</qoute>
I'm not sure the current way is the best for D. Instead of arguing for
ever for each tiny change until the community can persuade Walter to
change something in D - like the recent change to the opEqueals return
type to bool (that only took what, two years?) there are other much more
efficient ways to provide a buffer to protect the language from unneeded
changes.
Python for example has pypy, a python compiler written in python. every
new feature or idea proposed by the community has a pep (that's how they
call that, right?) and if needed they can easily develop an extension to
the that compiler (easy to do since pypy is written in python and not C)
that can be tested in a separate version outside of the "real" python
language. just create a prototype and test new ideas. if it works than
it would be integrated in a future version of python. if it doesn't work
just discard that code and move on.
same thing goes even for C++: there's an experimental branch of gcc to
test the design of features that will be added to c++0x. I recall
stumbling online on a gcc-concepts version to test the new concepts
feature, for example.
D doesn't have anything like this. the thread about a compiler-kit
showed that. people offer to pay 100$ to get the DMD backend as a lib. I
know that the money is not the main issue here and that Walter has
copyright concerns and such, but nevertheless this hurts D since there
is no way to test new ideas, and Walter puts this wall to protect the
released version of D.

All I want to say is basically: wouldn't it be better for D and much
faster if people could just create a modified test version of dmd to
test new ideas instead of trying to convince Walter to test those same
ideas himself? that way const would have been solved by now, and the 3
versions of it could have been developed simultaneously and require much
less effort to change.
D needs something akin to debian's three branches, IMO.