D has become unbearable and it needs to stop

GrimMaple grimmaple95 at gmail.com
Thu Jun 8 13:38:20 UTC 2023


I usually try to stay more silent (on the form at least), but I 
think I reached my boiling point. I've been a (self employed) 
full time D developer for almost 2 years now, developing quite a 
large codebase of personal closed source projects, as well as 
adopting some 3rdparty code like dlangui. And my life has become 
particularly miserable in the last half a year or so.

I wish I was exaggerating, but __every__ new DMD version breaks 
some of my code, to a smaller or bigger extent. It can be either 
my own code, or dependency code, but I started drowning in 
deprecation messages or outright breakage. It's nearly impossible 
to develop any reasonable 3rdparty in those conditions. I'm tired 
of fixing things that weren't broken. And I can't even imagine 
having to support multiple branches of code because of those 
deprecations. But I probably should, as, periodically, I get 
issues that dlangui can't compile with some outdated dmd version. 
It's just insane!

Recently, some of the changes resulted in direct API changes. 
This is unacceptable, as it, basically, forces people to update 
major versions and split the codebase between "before" and 
"after". Also forcing them to support two version of the same 
thing.

There have been a lot of talk about Gripes, about the "Vision" of 
D... But more than half a year passed, and yet the breakage only 
gets worse, and nothing seems to be improving. At least in 
regards of LTS. And with no proper LTS, no proper 3rd-party can 
exist.

So, as pissed as I am, please, for the love of everything, stop 
breaking D. I understand the desire to improve the language, but 
can you understand the desire to just... write working code? 
Please, make D at least somewhat stable.


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