Is it time for D 3.0?

Mike Parker aldacron at gmail.com
Fri Mar 27 22:34:40 UTC 2020


On Friday, 27 March 2020 at 17:17:44 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 3/27/20 12:58 PM, 12345swordy wrote:
>> On Friday, 27 March 2020 at 16:54:28 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
>> wrote:
>>> On 3/27/20 12:03 PM, 12345swordy wrote:
>>>> Didn't the 1.0 to 2.0 conversion nearly kill the language?
>>>
>>> No.
>>>
>> 
>> Oh, must had conflict it with something else.
>
> There was an issue with an alternative standard library 
> (Tango), which divided the community. That shouldn't be a 
> problem for a D3.
>

I remembered Tango being the bigger issue, too. But while working 
on the HOPL IV paper, digging through the forum archives, and 
recollecting with a few people, I realized that wasn't the whole 
story. The Tango split was real, but it almost certainly would 
have been much less of an issue without the move to D2. The D1/D2 
split was much more impactful. Some of the changes and new 
features required a paradigm shift (e.g., transitive 
const/immutable, ranges & algorithms). Tango with D1 was an 
escape hatch for those who were resistant to the changes (I was 
pretty resistant myself; wrote a big rant about it on my old 
blog). Some (like me) eventually came around. I'm now of the 
opinion that if Tango hadn't been around at the time, we may well 
have lost more people than we did.

There was also this quote from Walter a few years back:

https://forum.dlang.org/post/nmf48b$1ckm$1@digitalmars.com

"There are no plans for D3 at the moment. All plans for 
improvement are
backwards compatible as much as possible. D had its wrenching 
change with
D1->D2, and it nearly destroyed us."

I'm saying this just to point out the historical context, not to 
take sides on a potential D3. If we do move in that direction, 
IMO we need to do it in a way that's methodical and clearly 
mapped out.



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