D1 to be discontinued on December 31, 2012

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Hello everyone,


This is the end of the year, a good time to look both back and forward. 
Walter and I have had a long discussion about our strategy going forth. 
But before that, let's take a quick look at this year.

By all accounts, 2011 has been a terrific year for D. There has been 
unprecedented growth in the community; the disreputation of a 
fragmented, balkanized community is finally becoming a matter of the 
past; the community flame wars that were the norm in the past have given 
way to constructive dialog; there's more interest and more talk about D 
in public and private events; TDPL has been selling steadily; D's brand 
and major position on the programming languages landscape have become 
recognizable to many programmers; and most importantly, the community 
contribution to the compiler and standard library design and 
implementation has blown off the most optimistic expectations.

Going forward, we want to focus on D's core strengths: expressiveness, 
modeling power, and efficiency. We believe D is a very compelling 
programming language of this era, and we want to substantiate that 
belief with equally compelling libraries and applications.

In order to increase focus and unity in the language, we are 
discontinuing support for D1 on December 31, 2012. That's more than one 
year away, which gives enough time to D1 users to migrate libraries and 
applications to D2.

Phasing D1 away will not only clarify our vision, but also free up 
considerable time to concentrate on D's two largest issues: (1) quality 
of compiler implementation and (2) breadth of the standard library. 
These two matters prevent users from fully tapping into all of D's core 
assets. They affect expressiveness because code that's supposed to work 
doesn't or necessitates ugly workarounds; they affect modeling power 
because bugs prevent full creative uses of the language, and lacuna in 
the standard library limit the "bricks" to use when building; and they 
affect efficiency because, evidently, a quality compiler and a good 
standard library are essential ingredients in writing efficient code.

Best wishes for the next year and hopefully many years to come to an 
awesome community. Let's continue working together to reach D's 
ambitious potential.


Thanks,

Andrei