D popularity

[Rob T]

On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 18:40:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> It seems that D has too many features, and therefore an 
> exponentially
> huge number of possible combinations of features, and therefore 
> a large
> part of said combinations have not been tested (or 
> well-tested). So
> there still lurks many probably trivial bugs that haven't been 
> found,
> just because nobody has happened to use that particular 
> combination of
> features yet.

I have to wonder if many of the features can be generalized down 
into less features without sacrificing anything.

To solve the problem of instability, we need to stabilize the 
language, which is easy to do, and can be done in a way that does 
not prevent progress. All you need is to release a "stable" 
language specification along with a corresponding stable 
reference compiler that only implements the associated stable 
language release. The stable release is then fine tuned as bug 
reports come in over the course of a year (or whatever is 
required). The language development can proceed normally through 
an unstable branch. The next release can be tested through a 
semi-stable beta branch.

We're trying to develop a process to achieve this sort of thing, 
but unfortunately the language specification has not yet been 
integrated into the process. Hopeful the development process will 
be expanded to include the language spec in the near future, as 
it is a critical component that cannot be left out.

--rt