Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Jesse Phillips]

On Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:43:51 -0500, Jason House wrote:

> 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')
> 
> 
> I'm a D 1.x user who's ready to try D 2.x.  My only problem is that I
> use Tango, so I wait patiently.  I'm ok with D 1.x being very stable and
> only including fixes of obvious bugs.  Should there be something between
> a very stable 1.0xxx and 2.x?  Maybe.  I guess the question is how much
> stability is desired?  Why not move to 2.x now that const is stable?
> 
> --jason
> (who has now written and/or ported about 9,000 lines of D according to a
> quick check with 'wc')

I'm with Jason and Gregor on this one. Would it be nice to have these 
changes, yes, but I don't think that is the way to look at it. Even if D3 
is completely compatibly with all D2 code, I wouldn't want it be in the 
D2 tree. 

Think about it, you don't get all the Java 7 stuff in Java 6, just 
because you don't see it to want it. D2 is going to introduce a lot of 
breaking in old code, and headaches with const that many don't want. And 
I believe this is really where you're coming from? You like the lack of 
const, but want the other stuff? (not saying there is anything wrong with 
it. I'm kinda frightened to switch, eager, but frightened)