D Language Foundation Monthly Meeting Summary

[Mike Parker]

We've just completed our monthly meeting for the month of May 
2021. One decision we made is to start providing summaries of the 
topics discussed. Hence this forum post.

The participants: Walter, Atila, Andrei, Razvan, Max, and me.

### Goals & Tasks

The primary topic on our agenda for this meeting was a 
goal-oriented task list. In place of the old vision documents, we 
want to start maintaining a list of our current major long-term 
goals and some more minor short-term goals, broken down into 
specific tasks. This serves both as the current vision and as a 
task list for community members looking to make an impact with 
their contributions. For example, Bugzilla issues that fall under 
a goal will be labeled as such, so contributors can more 
effectively focus their attention. The list will also be used to 
guide some of the work our new strike teams will be doing.

We've got a preliminary list of high-level goals that we will 
flesh out with specific tasks over the next couple of weeks. For 
example, major long-term goals are memory safety (e.g., specific 
bugs, fully enabling DIP 1000 support) and Phobos v2. There were 
other goals discussed, such as implementing named arguments, 
improving compile-time introspection, improving Phobos @safety, 
and more. I don't know yet what the initial version of the final 
list will look like, but I hope to publish it in the next two or 
three weeks.

### Error Messages

We discussed how to improve error messages. Walter exhorts 
everyone to please raise a Bugzilla issue for specific error 
messages you encounter that you think need improvement. Walter 
also said he is open to accepting the implementation of a 
command-line switch that enables URLs in error messages to 
provide more information.

### Next Meeting

Our next monthly meeting will take place on June 25th. We haven't 
yet set the agenda, but a portion of it will be devoted to 
following up on some of the topics discussed in today's meeting.