What's left to do for a stable D2?

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> grauzone wrote:
>> Don wrote:
>>> grauzone wrote:
>>>> Jason House wrote:
>>>>> Andrei's finishing his last TDPL chapter, Sean is updating 
>>>>> std.thread(?), and Walter's been fixing forward reference and CTFE 
>>>>> bugs. What's left? 
>>>>
>>>> Documentation. The Phobos docs are rather bad, and don't even 
>>>> include the core modules. Also there's std.thread, shouldn't it be 
>>>> core.thread?
>>>>
>>>> You can't release D2 "on the masses" like that.
>>>
>>> It's only the language spec which is getting frozen, not the libraries.
>>> TDPL intentionally doesn't say much at all about Phobos.
>>
>> Well, you see, as TDPL is releases, there will be much attention on D, 
>> and people will go and try it out. Keep in mind that those people will 
>> know next to nothing about D. If the first what they'll experience is 
>> crashing on the chaotic documentation, that's going to be a major 
>> disappointment. It's like giving a birthday party without cake.
> 
> Expending a fraction of the energy spent in wringing hands on actually 
> helping with the documentation would mark a definite improvement.
> 
> Andrei


I'm not too worried about the quality of documentation, and as has been 
mentioned before, it's probably not necessary to finish Phobos before 
TDPL comes out.

What I think should be done, however, is to clear out the parts of 
Phobos you intend to remove or substantially rewrite.  First impressions 
matter, and I think it's better for a (potential) new user to be met 
with "this currently isn't available, but check back in a little while", 
rather than with a set of perhaps-not-so-well-designed modules that will 
disappear after some time anyway.

-Lars