About Andrei's interview, part 3

[bearophile]

Jonathan M Davis

> If D2's user base really increases like we'd like it to (and TDPL should help a lot with 
> that), it's going to cost users a lot more when backwards compatability is 
> broken.

This is why I don't like a lot the current work done for the 64 bit implementation. D2 has some design problems (I don't call them 'enhancement requests') that if you want to fix may require to break backward compatibility (they are things that can't just be added to the D2 language), few months ago I have listed about ten of them here (and I think Walter did just ignore them), and probably few more are present (and one or two of them in the meantime have officially become 'things to fix', like the syntax for array ops that I think now officially requires obligatory [], this was one of the things in my list of little breaking changes). I'd like those problems to be fixed (or specs to take them in account, even if the compiler implementation isn't yet up to date to them) before people start using D2 and breaking backwards compatibility becomes a pain. Otherwise they risk never being fixed.

Implementation matters come after design matters if you impose the constraint of keeping backwards compatibility.

Bye,
bearophile