Some Notes on 'D for the Win'

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 25 August 2014 at 11:20:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I sometimes have the feeling that because the D community 
> discusses every tiny feature or change elaborately (and rightly 
> so), people coming from the outside have the impression that 
> it's a half-baked (and thus unreliable) thing.

How is it not half-baked when DMD is released with regressions?

D lacks proper quality assurance and a clear distinction by 
experimental releases/features and production quality.

Features should have at least 6-12 months of testing before being 
used in production, IMO.

> Other languages often just "cover up" the discussions, or in 
> the case of Go, decisions are presented post factum (with a lot 
> of hype and "Hurra!" around them), which gives the impression 
> of a clean and tight (and thus reliable) project.

Go has reached feature stability and does not push experimental 
features into the production compiler. The libraries are limited 
in scope and thus of reasonable quality AFAIK.

Note that on Google App Engine the Go runtime is still listed as 
experimental. Only Java 7 and Python 2.7 are labeled as ready for 
production.

The problem is that D  will stay at 95% done forever without 
proper management.

A common thumb-of-rule is that 90% remains to be done when 90% of 
the code is written. I.e. the final polish, refactoring and 
maintenance is the most work. Don't underestimate the importance 
of the last 5%.

Go is lack-lustre, but it is more mature than D.

> So people from the outside have the impression that it's a bit 
> of a mess and they are ignorant as regards features and 
> improvements.

The process is a mess if you don't do feature freeze on one 
version that is mature and keep it in maintenance mode (only 
receiving safety bug fixes and focusing on stability).