We are forking D

[Nick Treleaven]

On Wednesday, 10 January 2024 at 11:01:07 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 21:56:55 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> The trouble is there are some coding problems that only I can 
>> resolve. For example, nobody else is crazy enough to have 
>> embedded a C compiler into D. Heck, I thought it was a crazy 
>> idea for a couple decades.
>
> Have you ever considered that this is the case because you 
> **deliberatly** created an environment where other people 
> simply don't want to resolve problems?

You may believe that but you can't know that your sentence is 
true. There's a good principle: 'Never attribute to malice that 
which can adequately be explained by incompetence'. It does both 
you and the recipient no good to insist on malice.

> Do you think that getting your changes reverted enables 
> positive thinking for trying to fix anything?

There are times when reverting things is necessary for the good 
of users in future, even if it upsets some people.

>> Would anyone else have implemented an ownership/borrowing 
>> system for D? It exists as a prototype in the compiler now, 
>> though it's been fallow for a bit as too many other things are 
>> happening. I know its design is controversial (Timon doesn't 
>> like it at all!), and it hasn't yet proven itself.
>
> Has anyone ever **cared** about ownership/borrowing in a 
> language that already fixed problems that borrowing fixes? Just 
> use the GC -- and there isn't a need for ownership checks.

Then why do people use Rust? People here use @nogc and -betterC. 
Some kind of ownership/borrowing system is the go-to solution for 
memory-safety without a GC.

> Interestingly enough, being too involved in D made me somewhat 
> afraid of making contributions at all. I was pleasantly 
> surprised when my changes were **silently** merged into other 
> projects despite me just dropping them out of nowhere. This is 
> the way I see an open-source project shall be to have any form 
> of success.

OTOH, users have complained about features not being finished or 
not interacting with other features how they want. So it's a 
great thing for users when language maintainers are careful when 
people want to add features or break compatibility. Fortunately I 
think the DLF have accepted the need for editions, so 
compatibility won't be so much of an issue.