Breaking D2 language/spec changes with D1 being discontinued in a month

SiegeLord none at none.com
Tue Nov 27 23:17:44 PST 2012


On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 02:29:12 UTC, bearophile wrote:

> It will take some more years to see D2 "stabilized" like that. 
> The decision to discontinue D1 has some disadvantages, but 
> keeping D1 updated uses some work time that could be (better) 
> spent improving D2.

With that kind of attitude D2 will never stabilize.

I remember two years ago I was told that once TDPL was published, 
the language would become stable. Two years later everything is 
just as in flux as it was back then. The welcome fixation of bugs 
is befouled with deliberate code breakage left and right. There 
is absolutely no guarantee of backwards compatibility between DMD 
versions. This situation is simply unheard of. Vast majority of 
respectable software inititives provide a stable version that 
guarantees source and possibly binary compatibility, and an 
unstable version that does not. They use versioning schemes where 
a match of some part of the version number assures compatibility.

Is there absolutely no concern for D users's code? It certainly 
seems like it. Maybe it would have made sense a decade ago when D 
was just starting... but D has been around for over 11 years now. 
To have screwed up so badly that after 11 years you still don't 
have a stable platform to write code for (well, you do with D1, 
but in a month there will not be that excuse) is mind boggling.


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