Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Bill Baxter]

Derek Parnell wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:20:38 +0900, 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.
> 
> I'm probably going against the trend here, but I do not code for D1 any
> more. My method of working is that I code for D2, then when that is
> working, I make it work with D1. Sure, it might mean recoding some slabs of
> code totally differently, but I'm not going to loose sleep if I'm not 100%
> D1 compatible, as that version WILL definitely be phased out before D2
> will.


Probably I should do what you've done and take an honest stab at porting 
my code to D2 to see how bad it really is.  But if I make the 
transition, I'm just going to turn my back on D1 completely.  There's no 
way I'm going to try to maintain compatibility.

What I know about D2 code comes mostly from porting Phobos2 to Phobos1, 
and frankly the need for bizarre constructs like "assumeUnique" just 
doesn't sit well with me.  Additionally, after ripping a lot of 
redundant const iterators out of various C++ ports, I really don't feel 
like putting them back.  The code is a lot clearer and much less 
redundant without them.  But I feel the code will now be incomplete 
without them in D2.

> D2 is fairly stable now in terms of syntax changes even though it has a
> number of bugs still remaining. But this is not mission-critical stuff I'm
> relying on right now. I don't think I'd write serious commercial software
> in D yet, of any flavour.

At least I know the placement of "const" for methods seems to still be 
somewhat up in the air.  Does it go before/after/either? Or maybe 
const(this) anyone?  Updating my code for that one change could be a 
pretty big headache if I choose the flavor that gets deprecated.

More than that, I *want* Walter to feel like he can break things big 
time in D2.  It's a great opportunity to improve the basics of the language.

--bb