Future of D

[Atila Neves]

On Monday, 30 October 2023 at 14:30:25 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
> On Monday, 30 October 2023 at 14:19:58 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
> wrote:
>> On Sunday, 29 October 2023 at 12:54:33 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
>>> Can we count on that if we find an issue with D that it will 
>>> be taken care of? And if so, how, and by whom? That it will 
>>> not be silently ignored for years? How can we safeguard 
>>> against that?
>>
>> By trying to be a net-positive contributor to the D ecosystem 
>> and especially core team: libraries, but also mentoring, 
>> money, etc. You create the incentives to help your company.
>> D is a communal effort, without supporting the community and 
>> "giving back" D wouldn't exist. It's really quite hard to do 
>> well.
>
> Well. I took a quick look at phobos for example.
>
> And it's been almost unchanged since 2019.
>
> We discussed this on Discord trying to understand why.
>
> Some name Andrei "leaving" is a reason, Wilzbach was also a 
> contributor who left. And Jack Stouffer.
>
> Some mentioned that betterC got too much attention and someone 
> else said too heavy focus on nogc slowed things down in general.
>
> I don't know which of these are correct, but it's a bit 
> worrying.
>
> Do you have an explaination to why the number of contributions 
> to phobos has decreased so much since about 2018-2019?

There's plenty of work to be done in Phobos, the issue is finding 
contributors. We need replacements for std.{json,xml}. I wouldn't 
mind replacing/updating std.socket either. Robert Schadek's made 
the case more than once that we need more file formats in there 
too,  which I agree with. Then there's the fact that we're 
currently concentrating on finishing/stabilising instead of 
adding new features.

The prerequisite right now in my opinion is finishing allocators 
and moving them out of experimental. I don't think it makes sense 
to start work on Phobos v2 before v1 is done, and it isn't. It 
doesn't help that I need to figure out how to include the 
library's evolution in the proposal for editions.