Is D 0.163 D 1.0?

[Reiner Pope]

John Demme wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> I think the title says it all.
> 
> Has anyone recommended that 0.163 should be labelled RC1?  I think this
> would be fair- hopefully it would focus attention from language changes to
> finding major bugs/flaws and the "Shop's closed- let's clean up and ship
> it" mentality.  It would tell people who are maintaining libraries to
> bother to update them to 0.163 so they will work with 1.0.
> 
I like this idea. I also know that other people have said before that a 
1.0 release should be quite polished, and that libraries are important. 
It seems that one of the major reasons for a 1.0 release is to act as 
one strong push to boost the D awareness. It is important to do this in 
one push as opposed to incremental releases (ie 1.0 language specs, then 
1.0 compiler, and then a 1.0 standard library release) because if people 
are not satisfied the first time they look at D, they are less likely to 
look later. As a result, it is better to spend a small time polishing it 
now, to make a great 1.0 release as opposed to an OK one.

Put simply, a 1.0 release should be a strong hit which persuades people 
to drop their current language and change to D. As a convert from 
C#/Java, I think D is better in every way except for _standard_ library 
support, and for every person who ignores that problem when coming to D, 
there will be many who don't. I know that there are many libraries 
around the place, like mango, the GUI libraries and mintl and dtl, so 
D's problem is not so much a lack of libraries, but rather a lack of 
*organised* libraries.

If we call 0.163 a release candidate, then, as John said, the library 
maintainers can update them to work with a future 1.0 release. Then, 
IMHO, D should stay at a frozen stage while we organize the libraries 
into one place so that they can rival Java/C#. This needs organization 
on the part of Walter in order to give an official stamp of approval, 
but the easier we make D for people, the more likely they are to want to 
join it.

Cheers,

Reiner