D1 to be discontinued on December 31, 2012

[Walter Bright]

On 12/14/2011 4:32 PM, Jakob Bornecrantz wrote:
> In short it can be answered with the questions "Can you
> guarantee it work?"

A guarantee would be something like you paid $x for it and I would refund your 
$x if you weren't completely satisfied (which I often do for Digital Mars C++ 
and other paid products). But I don't see how I could offer a guarantee on a 
free product where I have no control over your satisfaction.


> and "Can I justify the amount of work I have
> to put in for the gain?",

That's something only you can answer.


> the thing is I have a had a lot of
> problems with D1 toolchain, I have fixed or worked around these
> issues and I'm wondering if I have to work around those or other
> again. I am currently supporting 3 platforms (Mac, Linux &
> Windows), so that factors in as well (me having fixed some
> issues on Mac for D1).

I can ask:

1. Are these issues all reported in Bugzilla?
2. Are your fixes also supplied to Bugzilla?

With (1), I then will know about the issues, and myself or one of the many 
contributors can supply a fix. With (2), I can incorporate your fixes into the 
official toolchain so it will never darken anyone else's doorstep again.


> My current code base is 40Kloc's where about 8Kloc of those
> are library bindings, on top of that it also includes a couple
> of C projects sources (expat, lua and some other misc
> libraries). So I would have to convert all that code to D2 and
> also fix any issues that might arise from that conversion.
> That said I think that it would mostly running the code
> through dmd2 and just fix any cases where it complains. But it
> probably wouldn't be a trivial amount of work.

I don't know how much work that would be. I will say that 40Kloc is not a huge 
base of code, as these things go. I don't think you'll have to do anything with 
the C code or other non-D sources.


> I don't use Phobos that much in my code so I wont have to
> change much code with that regards, then again I don't see much
> value of the new Phobos since there isn't much new there for me.
> In fact I sort of have a philosophical disagreement with the
> boost/templet-ification of it and the language in general.

That's fair, but it's also something that could be a separate, wide-ranging 
discussion.

> Also in the beginning when I was using D1 and it moved much
> more faster I would often find myself having to work around
> or change various parts of the program due to new bugs or
> features. I think D2 is much better in the bug department then
> D1 was so that isn't much of a issue, but its still not really
> stable and its more work for me.

I understand the pain that breaking changes cause, and have pushed hard to stop 
a few that I felt the minor gains on did not justify the disruption.


> That said there are a couple of features that if they where
> implemented in D2 would encourage me to switch.
>
> One of the biggest problem right now is that I can't build
> my project on Windows and is forced to cross compile it with GDC
> from Linux. This stems from me having a mixed C & D project and
> not getting the various compilers to get along (Both DMD & DMC
> and GDC & GCC, would either not compile or produce broken
> binaries). So making DMD work with the mingw toolchain on
> Windows would be really appreciated (COFF support right?).

I cannot help with this without knowing what the specific problems are.


> Improvements to the GC, I'm currently having to thread lightly
> around various issues with the GC, again its works currently so
> I don't want to work around it again. Adopting a two step
> approach employed by GObject would might help.
> http://developer.gnome.org/gobject/stable/gobject-memory.html
>
>
> All said and done, knowing what I know today I would probably
> not do the project in D1, but I have thrown my dice and I'm
> "stuck" (not used strongly here, I still like a lot of D), but
> I'm not sure I would want to go through all that pain again
> with D2. As Andrie have said D has a tendency to come unglued
> when you start to do advanced thing, and the language dies a
> death of a thousand paper-cuts (and some knife stabs).

You don't have to write advanced code using D2. You can still write "C style" 
code with it, and even "D1 style" code in it.


> I do appreciate the work you have put into D over the years,
> I just don't want to have meaningless battles with language/-
> compiler bugs. I hope this message is useful for you.

It is, but I really do need more detail as outlined above.