D has become unbearable and it needs to stop

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Jun 09, 2023 at 04:41:28PM +0000, Adam D Ruppe via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 9 June 2023 at 16:22:15 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > I wasn't around during the D1/D2 split, but AFAIK there were D1
> > projects that eventually had no way to transition to D2 because of
> > fundamental language discrepancies that had no migration path.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> So worth noting that the D1/D2 split happened almost simultaneously:
> D2 came out about six months after D1. What happened previously is
> there was just the D language that changed randomly as it wanted.
> People asked for some long term support.
> 
> D1 was arbitrarily branched off. It became the "stable" version and
> the existing all-development version got rebranded D2.
> 
> This actually was a decent success for a while! Some big users stayed
> on stable successfully. But the stable thing eventually got dropped
> with no migration plan, and then there was never another stable
> release to replace it.
> 
> Would want to avoid repeating those latter mistakes.

See, to me this proves that:

(1) LTS is viable for D;

(2) A migration path must be provided to move between LTS releases.

Point (1) is simple, at least in theory. (Well, simpl*er*, anyway.)

Point (2) is something we need to work on.  There should be a clear
migration path for every breaking change introduced to the language, and
this should be well-documented in a well-known place.  Probably it's too
onerous to do this for every release (though ideally that should be the
case), but at the very least there should be a solid migration plan from
one LTS release to the next.

That way, users who want/need stability will have a way to migrate to
newer releases, and won't be left behind with a 10yo obsolete compiler
because there's no migration path. Users who don't mind breakages every
now and then can just stay with the current releases.


T

-- 
Caffeine underflow. Brain dumped.