Is D releasing too often?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, May 14, 2018 07:20:48 Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> There have been 6 major releases of dmd over the last year, with
> ldc trying to keep pace, currently only one release behind. This
> is a big jump up from the previous release schedule, I see 2
> major releases in 2014, 3 in 2015, and 3 in 2016.
>
> There are obviously pros and cons to each pace, and this has been
> debated internally before, with one of the ldc devs again posting
> to the Internals mailing list today questioning the current speed.
>
> I thought I'd open it up to the community: now that you've
> experienced this faster pace, as a user of the D compilers, how
> do you like it? Would you prefer a slower release schedule, say
> 3-4 major releases a year?
>
> I thought 6/year was an ambitious schedule when announced and I
> wonder if it isn't putting too much strain on our few release
> maintainers, maybe 3-4 releases/year would be a more gradual bump
> up.

I think that most of us are fine with how it's been going, but a large
percentage of the work for putting out each release goes to Martin, and he's
been talking about reducing the pace to something more like one major
release every 6 months, which I think would be too slow. I don't want to
have to wait that long for improvements to Phobos to become available.
Quarterly would be okay, I guess, but it's always frustrating when an
improvement makes it into Phobos but you can't use it for months, because
you have to wait for it to be released - and it's even worse when you want
to then be able to build your code with ldc, since they're always behind.

- Jonathan M Davis