How much time will D1 be around?

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 8:14 PM, Ary Borenszweig <ary at esperanto.org.ar> wrote:
> Now that D2 is being developed, I don't know how much time it will take
> until it is finished. Once it is, what will happen to D1? Will anyone still
> use it?
>
> I ask this because from time to time I like to add new features to Descent
> to improve D1 support. Semantic analysis is pretty done for D1, except for
> some bugs that are hard to fix, or at least take a lot of time. :-P
>
> For D2, there's still missing a lot of semantic analysis porting from DMD,
> and doing that is kind of boring (adding new features, that's fun). But if I
> add features to D1 and it will be gone soon, what's the point? Also, I feel
> that the great majority of the people here don't see an IDE as a helpful
> programming tool.
>
> But, in another point of view, I see a lot of big differences between D1 and
> D2. For instance, I don't like const/invariant, I don't care about that, I
> never had bugs or trouble or performance problems because of mutability
> problems, so I consider D1 easier to grasp. So I wonder if anyone else
> thinks "No matter what will happen, I'll probably just stick with D1".
>
> What do you think about all this?

Walter has said that he'll keep supporting D1 as long as people are
using it.  But I don't think he specified how many individuals he
considers to be "people" as opposed to "hardly anybody".

I plan to move to D2 at some point after DWT supports it.  Which means
as soon as DWT and Tango support it.  I'm not particularly excited
about const either, but I am excited about the fixed template bugs
which have been categorized as new D2 features.  And I don't think
I'll hate using D2s const, either.  It's just a little more than I was
looking for in a const system.  And I do believe it has a good chance
of giving D a leg up in the multicore world eventually.  I just don't
write a lot of multicore code right now, and D2 doesn't actually have
any multicore support to take advantage of the const system yet,
either.

After reading a post Sean Kelly made about using 'in' for D2
compatibility I started marking function arguments that I intended to
be const as 'in' in my D1 code.  Even if I don't ever port the code to
D2, it's a handy way to document that the argument is not going to be
modified.  It's just an unenforced convention in D1, but it's still
handy.  Beats the "/*const*/ arg" annotation I was using previously.
:-)

--bb