Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[Brad Roberts]

On 1/19/2012 1:25 AM, Manu wrote:
> You lead me to an interesting though though...
> I have been realizing one thing that is concerning me more and more though, and that is that for some reason, it always
> comes back to Walter. This seems absurd.
> Why should any feature be contingent on Walters time/excitement for the feature? He should be allowed to work on the
> SIMD if he wants, and it shouldn't significantly affect anyone.

Focusing on dmd for this email, phobos and druntime are essentially not dependent on Walter in any way:

Very little is truly contingent on Walter (though some parts are, such as optlink).  Currently, for dmd, all the patches
flow through him (there's a couple others that do have commit privs but we don't use them).  ANYONE is free to develop
changes and submit pull requests.  The problem is that there's few who currently do (around a dozen, and only 3 or 4
that are particularly active).  For changes that don't come from the community, Walter fills in the gaps.  Over the last
couple years, the number of contributors to dmd has grown nicely, if slowly.  If someone wrote the code for dmd to emit
coff format .obj files and it was demonstrated to work well with the microsoft compiler tool chain, I'll bet my next
paycheck that it'd be integrated seriously fast.

I pulled the stats on the number of pull requests we've seen since moving to github yesterday (see the phobos list for
the full details), but I'll repeat one from memory.  There's been 615 pulls to dmd of which only 58 are still open.
That's 91% handled and 9% left.  A decent number of requests are delt with on a daily basis.

Another interesting tool is github's impact grph:
  https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/graphs/impact

Anyway, hope that colors things a bit for you.

Later,
Brad