Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Ameer Armaly]

"Bill Baxter" <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote in message 
news:fqq8ps$g0r$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Currently as we all know, D1 gets no new features, and D2 is a crazy 
> rocketship that could change direction at any moment.
>
> Now I know a lot of people were asking for D to become more stable pre D1 
> days, but is this really what you wanted?
>
> I had initially assumed that the freeze on D1 was at least as much due to 
> time constraints on Walter as it was due to a desire for stability. But in 
> a recent message Walter said that wasn't the case.  He said that 
> backporting things from D2 to D1 was pretty trivial.
>
> So really then, it to comes down to Walter believing that the D community 
> wants D1 to be feature frozen.
>
> Is it really true?  Is there a group of folks who really want D1 to be 
> frozen?
>
IMO it's not so much a case of wanting D1 to be frozen but wanting D1 to 
become more polished I.E. instead of trying to backport new language 
features, we should try and move towards some kind of consensus regarding 
standard libraries. Once D1 doesn't appear to have EXPERIMENTAL written all 
over it then backporting non-breaking features might be viable.
> I myself would like to see D1 get all new features that won't break 
> existing source code.
>
> Things like:
> * New string literals
>   - q{a=b} D-token string syntax,
>   - delimited strings, q"(...)"
>   - heredocs, q"EOF...
> * IFTI that works even if you specify one parameter,
> * Enhanced is expression
>   - is ( Type Identifier : TypeSpecialization , TemplateParameterList )
>   - is ( Type Identifier == TypeSpecialization , TemplateParameterList )
> * foreach(i; 0..10) syntax (ForeachRangeLiteral)
> * Overload sets
>
>
> I'm all with the sentiment that D1 code that compiles today should compile 
> tomorrow.  That kind of stability is great.  But if it's not a big time 
> commitment for Walter (which he says it's not), I see no good reason to 
> keep new backwards-compatible features out of D1.
>
> I've heard other folks saying they want this from D1 too, but what I 
> haven't heard is a great swell of active D developers saying that new 
> features would be a detriment to their work.
>
> --bb,
> (who has now written and/or ported about 200,000 lines of D according to a 
> quick check with 'wc')