We are forking D

[Abdulhaq]

On Tuesday, 2 January 2024 at 17:55:56 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>
> Growing greatly dissatisfied with how things are in the D 
> Programming Language, we decided it is time to fork it.
> We want to change the way decisions are made, giving both more 
> freedom to change, and more speed to decision making. We want 
> the process of contribution to be as open-ended as possible, 
> and not having unnecessary blockage to contributions. We also 
> want the language to allow for faster software development. The 
> way this is going to be achieved is still not finalized, but 
> that is the goal.

I think this is a good way for Adam and co. to blow off some 
steam and push forward with the changes they would like to see. I 
wish them all well on that. They should achieve their goal of 
evolving their preferred flavour of D faster than it would 
otherwise happen.

Other potential goals such as becoming a popular and well used 
dialect of D will be much harder to achieve. A lot of people 
currently put in a lot of effort on the project admin side, such 
as web sites, source code management, funding, organising 
conferences, dealing with commercial customers etc. A handful of 
gearheads will not want to be spending their weekends and 
evenings doing that.

This time next year Adam will have a new understanding of why 
things are as they are.

If this "fork" could be under the umbrella of the main D project, 
as an experimental D, then I think it has more chance of 
influencing D and getting the changes into the mainline.

Right now in Discord there is talk of changes to ranges, dub, 
iterators etc. Significant changes in those areas would take 
months/years and likely isolate "OpenD" and break many of the 
libraries in existence. It would make the chances of adoption 
very small and the community would likely remain small and cut 
off from the main stream.

Just my two cents.