Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Gregor Richards]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> 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')

Having an unstable base (and I don't mean unstable in the software 
sense) makes reimplementations (including partial reimplementations e.g. 
GDC), ports, etc very difficult. With a feature freeze on 1.0, there is 
a solid, specified language that one can target without having to keep 
up with a changing specification.

  - Gregor Richards