Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Andre Pany]

On Saturday, 25 August 2018 at 20:52:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/25/2018 3:52 AM, Chris wrote:
>> On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 19:26:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Every programmer who says this also demands new (and 
>>> breaking) features.
>> "Every programmer who..." Really?
>
> You want to remove autodecoding (so do I) and that will break 
> just about every D program in existence. For everyone else, 
> it's something else that's just as important to them.
>
> For example, Shachar wants partially constructed objects to be 
> partially destructed, a quite reasonable request. Ok, but 
> consider the breakage:
>
>   struct S {
>     ~this() {}
>   }
>
>   class C {
>     S s;
>
>     this() nothrow {}
>   }
>
> I.e. a nothrow constructor now must call a throwing destructor. 
> This is not some made up example, it breaks existing code:
>
>   https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6816
>
> If I fix the bug, I break existing code, and apparently a 
> substantial amount of existing code. What's your advice on how 
> to proceed with this?

In the whole discussion I miss 2 really important things.

If your product compiles fine with a dmd version, no one forces 
you to update to the next dmd version. In the company I work for, 
we set for each project the DMD version in the build settings. 
The speed of DMD releases or breaking changes doesn't affect us 
at all.

Maybe I do not know a lot open source products but the amount of 
work which goes into code quality is extremely high for the 
compiler, runtime, phobos and related products. I love to see how 
much work is invested in unit tests and also code style.

DMD (and LDC and GDC) has greatly improved in the last years in 
various aspects.

But I also see that there is a lot of work to be done. There are 
definitely problems to be solved. It is sad that people like 
Dicebot leaving the D community.

Kind regards
Andre