Is it time for D1 to die of natural causes?

[SiegeLord]

Justin Johansson Wrote:

> Now that Andrei's much anticipated publication of TDPL is out, is it 
> time that D1 should now perish?
> 
> My personal feeling is that by cremating D1, time and effort can then be 
> better expended and focused on solidifying D2.
> 
> Cheers
> Justin Johansson

To whose benefit? You are advocating nerfing a good, stable, usable language that has an excellent (de facto) standard library, excellent compilers (on Linux, at least), 64 bit support, tons of libraries already written for it etc, and replacing it with a buggy language, buggy standard library, buggy linker, no 64 bit support and only a handful of libraries to support developing in it.

How do users benefit from your suggestion? I have scientific computing that must be done *right now* as well as games I want to develop *right now* and I don't want suffer the performance losses that come from DMD's substandard optimizer (at least, relative to LLVM), as well as Phobos 2's abstractions (although a better compiler might solve those issues) and not using 64 bits. I just tried installing dmd2 on my 64 bit Linux box, and while it installed, I couldn't compile "Hello World", since I have no 32 bit versions of 32 bit pthread libraries installed. I am not going to install 32 bit versions of every library I use in my C++ development to use them in D2, that is simply unreasonable: I will use D1 instead.

And I'm not worried about investing into D1 and then have my work be obsolete: I am fully planning on porting my things to D2 *when* it becomes better than or even as good as D1 for my purposes. It's easy to do... just don't use too many deprecated features.

D2 will only become the dominant version if it is actively better than D1, not by making D1 "disappear." Users are not going to encounter those issues and start spending their "time and effort" improving the standard library and compiler tools, it isn't worth their time: they will go use a different language instead. For D2's future's sake, that different language should be D1.

This reminds me of the Vista debacle :P I'm using XP on my other computer too, hehe... so removing support will not kill D1 anyway ;)

-SiegeLord