D1 to be discontinued on December 31, 2012

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Tue Dec 13 14:57:11 PST 2011


On 12/13/11 2:47 PM, torhu wrote:
> I've got one D1 spare time project that I'm still maintaining. Zero D2
> projects, as I tried it and then decided to wait until it has had more
> time to mature.
>
> I'm still using DMD 1.061, since there are very few remaining serious
> compiler bugs. The compiler has gotten pretty good, so the incentive to
> upgrade is not very strong. And I rarely need to ask questions about D1,
> since I've been using it for 5 years now.

The important question here is, what is the future of D1? In Walter's 
and my opinion, D1 is a nice language but simply does not have enough 
horsepower to compete successfully against either today's established 
languages or their other contenders. D1's modeling power is insufficient 
(e.g. can't define value types). Its view of concurrency and parallelism 
is at best naive, and in any case incomparably inferior to C++11 or 
Java. Although D1 offers lambdas, they are slow unless special 
compilation techniques are used (which tend to fall apart on only 
moderately complex code). Finally, there's no notion of immutability, 
which hurts all of modularity, modeling power, concurrency, and 
functional style.

It's difficult to work on something you don't believe in. Yes, we could 
keep D1 on artificial life support until we retire, but to what end?

The story with D2 is entirely different. D2 has very lofty goals, and 
most of its past and current implementation insufficiencies are due to 
that. But D2 has legs; non-PL people often confuse what we know are 
transitory issues with fatal language design flaws. D2 does have a few 
design flaws (every language does) but none is major, and most 
importantly, it has a lot going for it: generic and generative abilities 
that beat the pants off all other languages; an innovative concurrency 
model; and nicely integration across several paradigms. That's a lot of 
muscle on a relatively small frame. (Yeah, "too many notes.")

> I have a feeling new users mostly go for D2, only to discover that it's
> not ready for prime time. Then they just leave, instead of checking out
> D1. Of course, I'm just guessing.

At this point what we need is to make D2 ready for prime time, not 
invite people to our B-list offer.


Andrei


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