Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Edward Diener]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> 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?
> 
> 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.

I disagree that new features in D2 should be backported.

I am a newbie to D and what I think D1 needs is for any bugs to be fixed 
and for the documentation to be improved in that it needs to be more 
expansive so that end users understand how to use the language. Right 
now the docs are still very sparse and not easy to understand.

Essentially D1 needs to be made as solid as possible for end users. 
Keeping it in flux is not a good way to attract people to D. One always 
needs a release of a language that people can use with confidence.

When D2 is finally finished, it needs to be treated the same. Fix bugs 
and update the documentation to be better, so it can be used more easily 
and understood. Have all new features beyond it go in a new version.

Endlessly making changes to a language for each and every release is 
not, repeat not, a good way to get people to use that language and its 
libraries in a serious way in order to write modules and applications.