Criteria for 1.0 (was: Re: If D becomes a failure, what's the key reason, do you think?)

[Dave]

Tim Starling wrote:

[Good points snipped for brevity]

> 
> Why is Walter the only person who ever fixes bugs in the compiler? This 
> seems to slow the whole project down. Why not move the free frontend 
> source to a versioning system and give 10 people write access? Then 
> Walter can produce DMD binaries from the improved multi-developer source 
> code, and everyone else can produce GDC binaries from the same source. 
> Maybe some interfaces would have to be cleaned up, but I would think it 
> would be well worth the effort, in the long term.
> 

A compiler perhaps more than 95% of the rest of the software out there 
is subject to "a change in one thing could break several others". The 
other part is that this is not like GCC C or C++ where there is an 
agreed upon and very detailed language spec; the D spec is still 
evolving here and there as it needs to right now.

As to compiler development productivity: Walter makes a new release 
every month or so on average, most of them with either several bug fixes 
and/or a new feature or two. I don't see that from any other compiler 
vendor out there, OSS or not :)

> -- Tim Starling