D as a betterC a game changer ?

[Adam Wilson]

On 12/27/17 00:10, Pawn wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 December 2017 at 09:39:22 UTC, codephantom wrote:
>> IMHO..What will help the cause, in terms of keeping D as a 'modern'
>> programming language, is the willingness of its designers and its
>> community to make and embrace 'breaking changes' ... for example,
>> making @safe the default, instead of @system.
> It's been expressed that there are now too many codebases such that
> introducing "breaking changes" would upset many people and companies. D
> is a mature language, not a young one.
>

This is not true. I was at DConf one year (can't remember which) and I 
watched the representative of one of D's larger corporate users do 
everything but actually get on his knees and beg Walter to make a 
breaking change. IIRC they demonstrated their work around for the 
missing change a couple of DConf's later.

The reason that D isn't making breaking changes is that the language has 
enough broken stuff as it is. It does not make much sense to fork a 
code-base with significant known issues, break more things without 
fixing the existing things, and then release as a new version. It would 
create even more bugs and perpetuate the 'D is broken' meme. Once D2 has 
been thoroughly vetted and is free of known-bugs (sometimes called Zero 
Bug Bounce, there may be unknown bugs that are discovered, but all known 
bugs are fixed). Additionally, consider that if we have a stable base in 
D2 it will be much easier to merge bug-fixes into D3 while D3 is being 
worked on.

Let's fix the crap we have now. It'll take a while, it's not sexy, and 
it certainly won't make headlines on HN or Reddit. But it will have the 
effect of combating the biggest negative that D has to adoption. The 
perception of instability.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
import quiet.dlang.dev;