Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Bill Baxter]

Currently as we all know, D1 gets no new features, and D2 is a crazy 
rocketship that could change direction at any moment.

Now I know a lot of people were asking for D to become more stable pre 
D1 days, but is this really what you wanted?

I had initially assumed that the freeze on D1 was at least as much due 
to time constraints on Walter as it was due to a desire for stability. 
But in a recent message Walter said that wasn't the case.  He said that 
backporting things from D2 to D1 was pretty trivial.

So really then, it to comes down to Walter believing that the D 
community wants D1 to be feature frozen.

Is it really true?  Is there a group of folks who really want D1 to be 
frozen?

I myself would like to see D1 get all new features that won't break 
existing source code.

Things like:
* New string literals
   - q{a=b} D-token string syntax,
   - delimited strings, q"(...)"
   - heredocs, q"EOF...
* IFTI that works even if you specify one parameter,
* Enhanced is expression
   - is ( Type Identifier : TypeSpecialization , TemplateParameterList )
   - is ( Type Identifier == TypeSpecialization , TemplateParameterList )
* foreach(i; 0..10) syntax (ForeachRangeLiteral)
* Overload sets


I'm all with the sentiment that D1 code that compiles today should 
compile tomorrow.  That kind of stability is great.  But if it's not a 
big time commitment for Walter (which he says it's not), I see no good 
reason to keep new backwards-compatible features out of D1.

I've heard other folks saying they want this from D1 too, but what I 
haven't heard is a great swell of active D developers saying that new 
features would be a detriment to their work.

--bb,
(who has now written and/or ported about 200,000 lines of D according to 
a quick check with 'wc')