How is the D programming language financed?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday 23 December 2010 12:43:11 Thomas Mader wrote:
> Am 2010-12-23 21:01, schrieb spir:
> > On Thu, 23 Dec 2010 17:41:06 +0100
> > 
> > Thomas Mader<thomas.mader at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> I think it's very important for D to step into the corporate world to
> >> get more stability, a bigger community and therefore a stronger
> >> toolchain. For this to happen companies need trust in the future of the
> >> project and the future are the people and the infrastructure behind D.
> > 
> > This is true, but having important corporate investment would also
> > strongly freeze the language in a premature state. It's too early (for
> > D2).
> > 
> > Denis
> > -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> > vit esse estrany ☣
> > 
> > spir.wikidot.com
> 
> I agree but I must confess that I'm confused about the state of D2.
> It's said that for new projects someone should use D2 but I often
> recognize that it is not considered ready/finished yet. On the other
> hand I also read somewhere that with the release of the book "The D
> programming language" D2 is finalized?
> 
> Can somebody please enlighten me on this?

With the release of TDPL, the D spec is no longer undergoing massive changes 
with each release. It is mostly finalized. However, there have been some issues 
that have come up or which were not 100% sorted out prior to TDPL being 
released, so some changes to the spec may be made. They will, however, only be 
made as necessary, and there shouldn't be very many of them. Also, they'd mostly 
deal with fancier features such as inout or alias this.

That being said, regardless of the state of the spec, there's the state of the 
compiler and the standard libraries. The compiler continues to progress, but it 
has plenty of bugs in it still, and it has yet to implement everything in TDPL 
(e.g. you can currently only have one alias this per class or struct instead of 
multiple like TDPL says), though it has implemented almost all of it. The 
compiler is stable enough that you should be able to write code in it - even for 
larger projects - just fine. But you will run into bugs. So, if you want rock-
solid stability, then it's not up-to-snuff yet. But it works quite well overall, 
and many consider the benefits to far outweigh the problems. And the compiler 
continues to improve with each release, so the number of problems is 
diminishing.

Phobos, however, continues to be in flux and is definitely not finalized. Much of 
it is pretty fixed and won't be undergoing major changes, but other parts will 
continue to change as development continues. Some modules will be removed 
(though not many) and others will be added. The release of TDPL did not indicate 
the finalization of Phobos at all. Phobos is very much still a work in progress. 
So, while you can mostly rely on it not changing enough to force you to change 
code with a new compiler release, it definitely does happen at least some of the 
time.

So, D2 is definitely ready for use, but it's still rough around the edges. 
Whether it's appropriate or not far a particular project likely depends on how 
mission critical the project is.

- Jonathan M Davis