D Language Foundation January Planning Session Summary: The First Edition

[Mike Parker]

This planning session took place on January 23. The goal was to 
finalize the details of the first edition.

## The Attendees

* Walter Bright
* Rikki Cattermole
* Jonathan M. Davis
* Dennis Korpel
* Mathias Lang
* Mike Parker
* Átila Neves
* Robert Schadek
* Steven Schveighoffer
* Adam Wilson

## The summary

Some time ago, we agreed in principle that the first edition 
should be focused on plugging holes in existing language 
features. But in scheduling this meeting, I asked everyone to 
prepare a list of what they thought should be in the first 
edition without constraining the list items to plugging holes.

We started with Átila's list, which included things like removing 
`synchronized` and class monitors, and an explict syntax for 
classes that would allow applying attributes to class instances 
instead of only the reference.

After a few minutes, Dennis said this all seemed out of scope for 
the first edition. He suggested limiting the scope to existing 
deprecations and preview switches, and leaving other ideas for 
later editions.

Jonathan thought that even if we were to do that, we should also 
at least plug safety holes by making `@system` anything we knew 
wasn't memory safe right now. This kind of thing was the 
motivation of our initial decision about plugging holes in the 
first edition.

We covered some other topics, like what we should use to specify 
the pre-editions version of the language. The DIP called for `0`, 
but Walter didn't like that, primarily because it added an extra 
check in the code. We eventually came around to the idea that it 
should be any number lower than the first edition, e.g., if 
`2026` is the first edition, then any number `< 2026` represents 
the pre-editions language.

## Conclusion

The final outcome was that we agreed the first edition would 
focus on removing currently deprecated features. This would be a 
good test run for the editions implementation. The next step was 
to compile a list of all deprecated features and determine what 
the set of removals should be.

We're having another planning session at the end of this month 
where we'll finalize the deprecations and start talking about the 
next edition, which we subsequently agreed should focus on 
enabling some of the preview switches by default. We'll open that 
up to discussion in the forums.