Origins of the D Programming Language

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 12/4/18 2:23 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 19:04:35 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>> The timeline does not have when work started on D 2.0 and when the 
>> first release was or what have you.
> 
> D 2.0 started in 1999.
> 
> The truth is D has just been constantly evolving from the beginning. All 
> D1 is was an arbitrary snapshot on the path, which briefly branched off 
> with just bug fixes (of course, one user's bug fix is another user's 
> breaking change).
> 
> Then, the D language continued evolving the same has it has the last 8 
> years, just now that one random snapshot got labeled D1, the ongoing 
> evolution got rebranded D2, since it would sound silly is D 0.xxx was 
> considered newer than 1.0.
> 
> 
> The officially labeled 2.0 came out in July 2007, six months after the 
> officially labeled 1.0, but really that is just because of a brief 
> freeze to focus more on bugs than any real "it's done" materializing.

 From my memory, I remember the big thing of D 2.0 was immutable/const. 
Essentially there was no way to shoehorn immutable (then called 
invariant) and const into the D compiler without breaking everything 
(and as one who tried to port Tango to D2, I experienced this 
first-hand), so the fork was made. I'm sure there was a definitive point 
at which this was decided. Unfortunately, I don't think DMD was even 
using subversion back then, so the code history may be hard to construct.

-Steve