If I had my way

[Jesse Phillips]

I wish to add a little of why Mehrdad's complaints are very 
important. I think the delay is a good, over releasing 2.058 two 
days later.

Most in the community have chosen what they will use of D, they 
know of some issues (no multiple alias this), or don't know how 
best to use something (concurrency).

In our marketing for the language we express how great 
such-and-such is, but know that problems will be found by those 
that use it. We could not mention concurrency and how 
immutable/const plays its rule, but we need to answer what is 
different from D1 and how the future of computing will be easier 
in D.

Interestingly Mehrdad has chosen something which does basically 
nothing, the const system. Const isn't important at _all_, except 
that it is a pillar for our functional concurrent purity. We 
claim a language that makes an immutable and mutable world 
coexist. Yet the implementation doesn't back that up.

So why should we probably finish fixing up const, over say the 
multiple alias this, @safe, or no GC use? Because it is what will 
be touched by new users the most. You tell people how great 
mixing immutable and mutable is, they're going to give it a try. 
You pull users over from C++ or other languages with 
non-transitive const, they are going to use const as they do in 
that language without reading about how D does it. These people 
aren't going to be using const correctly in D, they couldn't 
possibly know how to. When they complain, we explain what is 
wrong and how they should be using it, but when they do start 
using it correctly (because they won't listen to our "don't use 
const yet" message) they will still fail to get it right because 
implementation doesn't support it.

We need to be able to prove transitive const is easy to work with 
and worth it. Transitive const is hard to see how it works, but 
no GC and explaining multiple alias this is simple to understand. 
And @safe D is not what brings people to D.

There was a concentration on TDPL bugs before the book came out, 
lets bring that back and get them done for 2.058: 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc=tdpl&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr

What do you say team?