Ch-ch-changes

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Hello all,


There's quite a few changes that we're very excited about, that I'd love 
to share to the extent possible.

First, we have decided to extend commit rights to Daniel Murphy and 
Martin Nowak, two heavyweight dmd contributors better known under their 
noms de plume: yebblies and dawgfoto, respectively. Please join me in 
congratulating them for this token of appreciation for their talent and 
hard work.

We want to move dmd forward faster, and we're encouraging committers to 
be more aggressive about reviewing and merging patches. Language changes 
will still have to get through Scylla and Charybdis (that's Walter and 
yours truly), but bug fixes and other non-controversial work can be 
safely parallelized.

Here's a small draft to guide contributors to the compiler proper: 
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?Contributing_To_The_D_Compiler. 
It's mostly authored by Don, and we should all add to it sections and 
topics that we consider relevant. At a later point we'll link to the 
document from the website, or integrate it there.

We also want to formalize and automate our processes, including building 
the compiler and its libraries, testing it all, contributing, website, 
and so on. We believe that's a prerequisite to handle (and indeed 
condition) the projected growth of the language. To that end, we'll try 
to define and use a build and release procedure. There's been talk about 
a git workflow; if anyone wants to volunteer creating a detailed 
document describing the steps done, that would be awesome.

Last but not least, we're in talks with a professional conference 
organizer about setting up a D conference. We're looking at some quite 
interesting approaches, but one invariant is that community 
participation and drive is key. We'll get back to you as details firm 
up; for now, lightly hash the months of April and May with a pencil.


Thanks,

Andrei

P.S. Speaking only for myself: there's been robust community growth and 
increase in participation in the past twelve months. It's also clear to 
me that although the resources we have now are fine for today's user 
base, we need to scale well in advance to what we project. By my 
estimates the community size is in the five digits now. To go 1-2 orders 
of magnitude higher, I estimate that continuing to do what we do today 
is far from enough, so we'll need to do some radical changes. Some may 
be risky, and some may be painful. But the as the guy in "Die Hard 2" 
said: no guts, no glory. Let's do this together.