What's the current state of D?

[Tomas Lindquist Olsen]

On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 8:56 PM, Walter Bright
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Steve Teale wrote:
>>
>> I am not criticizing you. I think you are doing a great job under the
>> pressure of a slew of suggestions. But maybe a line in the sand at
>> some point?
>
> But there *is* a line in the sand - D1.
>
>> OK so for those who crave stability there is D1.x, but when all the
>> focus appears to be on D2, what level of confidence is afforded to D1
>> users. Can a project Manager cross his heart and say that D1 will
>> still be alive and well in five years time?
>
> This just makes me very frustrated. Every fix going into D2 that also
> applies to D1 has been folded into D1. There are even some fixes that only
> apply to D1 that only go into D1. These average about 20 per month. D1 even
> got the FreeBSD port before D2. What other language gets that kind of
> support?
>
>

A lot of good points have been brought forward in this thread. To me
the big problem with D1 is that we *still* don't have a conforming
(what does that even mean with D) compiler.

Yes I'm thinking forward reference problems and such. Sure, these are
hard problems to fix in the compiler, at least at this point. It's
something that should have been fixed immediately when the first bug
report came in.

>From my work on LDC I've seen a lot of the DMD frontend source code,
its glitches, but of course also those "wow, that's neat" moments.
However, one thing is very certain, it has some horrible problems with
order-of-things issues, which the spec says should not matter.

I'm talking about forward references, differing semantic trees
depending on the order of declarations, imports etc. even the order in
which modules are passed on the command line can affect the resulting
semantic trees (yes I mean AST, but DMD has no distinction, it
rewrites the AST happily until it thinks the result is sane).

The main feeling I've come to settle on during the soon two years I've
spent with LDC, is: we need a new frontend! D1 and D2 both have these
problems, and they're not going away by themselves.

-Tomas