My two cents

[jmh530]

On Friday, 20 October 2017 at 15:38:53 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
>
> Something I want to have for quite a while is a free-form poll 
> for features, maybe running 2 weeks or so, to get a better 
> understanding of community priorities.
>

Maybe once a quarter, ;)

It might help to have some sense of how the main devs time on D 
is being used. Not in any kind of exact way, more hand-wavy. For 
instance, if w% of their time is on fixing bugs, x% on 
maintenance, y% on working towards safety, z% on other stuff they 
are already doing that I'm not included, then time spent on new 
features or syntax has to come from somewhere of that. What do 
you reduce your time on to implement them? That's where it gets 
tricky. Is elvis operator more important than improving 
safe/scope/nogc/etc, I think most would say no.

This is the economic way of looking at things. Taking the number 
of devs and the hours they spend on D as given, how they spend 
that time is an allocation problem. Walter and Andrei and Martin 
have in their heads some ideas about what is the best approach. 
However, when you think of resources (dev D) as finite, then 
someone would need to be able to show that the new features or 
syntax are more important than the other things that they are 
already working on. That's why DIPs.