What remains to be done for D2?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On 2011-06-14 02:07, Don wrote:
> Petr Janda wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Can someone please explain what needs to be done (other than fixing
> > the plethora of bugs) to call D2 final? And if someone can provide
> > an approximate estimate of when?
> 
> There are a couple of areas of major missing functionality:
> * CTFE should support pointers (upcoming release 2.054) and classes
> (2.055). * alias this, inout, safe aren't fully implemented, and will
> probably require language changes/clarifications.
> * Built-in struct functions (opEquals, toString, etc) need more thought.
> * I suspect that we'll see changes to the modifiers for function
> parameters (in, out, inout, ref, auto ref)
> 
> At the current rate of progress I estimate we are about six months from
> having the language implemented (but still with bugs).
> But there will still be bugs which can only be fixed by making small
> changes to the language spec.
> 
> Phobos is quite a bit further away from being "final".
> 
> With regard to bugs: the last release fixed more than half of the most
> important and difficult structural bugs remaining in the compiler,
> including some which had been deferred for years. There are a huge
> number of open bugs, of course, but we are on a downhill run now.

Yeah. It's been pretty amazing how much the speed of compiler development has 
picked up since we've moved to github. The situation with Phobos has been 
improving as well between the move to github and having new modules reviewed 
in the newsgroup, but it hasn't been improving at anywhere near the rate that 
the compiler has been - though there are certain classes of issues which 
require that the compiler be improved before they can be fixed in Phobos (such 
as adding some sort of conditional attributes to allow for pure, @safe, and 
nothrow on templated functions whose ability to have those attributes depends 
on the arguments that they're instantiated with). I do think that it's only 
natural that Phobos would be a bit behind the language itself since it has to 
use the language to do whatever it does, but we could definitely use more help 
developing Phobos - be it fixing bugs, implementing new features, or simply 
reviewing pull requests on github.

- Jonathan M Davis