All this talk about finalising D2 makes me worried

[Stewart Gordon]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:22:30 -0400, Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 at yahoo.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> With apologies to Bruno Medeiros....
>>
>> All this talk about getting D2 finished (and other things like what 
>> comes next) makes me worried. People talk as if D2 is nearing 
>> completion: there are even threads about the coming or even requesting 
>> the release of the finished product that D2 will be.
>>
>> For a start, finishing D1 off has to come first.
> 
> What bugs in D1 are fixed in D2?  I think Walter is fixing D1 and D2 
> bugs in parallel.

I'm not sure OTTOMH, but I'm sure there are some.  Nor am I quite sure 
of the relevance of this....

> I think the expectation that D2 will be released soon is because of 
> Andrei's book.  I didn't search for the thread where he said the date, 
> and specifically that D2 should be finished by the time the book is 
> released, but I recall it being sometime this year.
> 
> In any case, I highly doubt that D2 will be "finished" by the time the 
> book is released. 

IWC the book'll have to work around the ambiguities in the spec.  Maybe 
it can be done....

> Things are in such a state of flux, and there are so many planned, 
> but unimplemented, features, especially surrounding pure functions 
> and multithreading.  I would guess that D2 would be in a feature 
> freeze mode, even if some of the features aren't even implemented, 
> kind of like contracts are for D1.
<snip>

Contracts have been implemented for as long as I've known D.  Are you 
thinking of something else, e.g. contract inheritance?

A distinction must be made between a feature freeze and a spec freeze. 
In the run-up to 1.0 I pressed for a feature freeze decision to be reached:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/41553.html

This was so that the remaining time could be spent making the spec 
complete and consistent and fixing compiler bugs.  Once the spec issues 
are fixed, a spec freeze can be put in place.  This is an issue for 
anybody wanting to implement D and for any D tools/libraries to reach 
commercial quality.  Sadly, nearly three years on, even D1 isn't quite 
there yet.
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=677

>> If that's the case, then it leaves the door open to implement those 
>> features (and for edition 2 of the book!), even though D2 is 
>> "finished".

Maybe D 2.0 can be considered feature-frozen in the near future, but I 
still feel that this is a bridge we need to get to before crossing it. 
And then we'll need to make sure the D 2.0 spec is complete and 
consistent before freezing that, but can start work on D 2.1 in the 
meantime.  The spec freeze on D 2.0 would be part of the definition of 
finished in the same way.  But let's not let this detract from the task 
of finishing D1.

Stewart.