Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Bill Baxter" <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote in message 
news:fqq8ps$g0r$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.

I'd like a lot of the new D2 features (__traits, a lot of the new 
compile-time stuff like template enhancements, foreach(i; 0 .. 10)) but at 
the same time I don't feel like DMDFE is mature enough to offer me a stable, 
bug-free implementation of many of these features.  Furthermore I'm not 
entirely sold on const and until that _actually_ gets sorted I'd like to 
stay away from D2.   God only knows how long _that_ will take.  A D1 + 
extras version of the compiler would be nice but that seems like a special 
provision that would only make it harder for compiler implementors and 
library users to conform to.

I'll be contributing to Dil as much as I can over the rest of the semester 
and the summer break, undoubtedly also contributing to the D2 side of 
development, but I can't promise that I'll be switching to D2 any time soon. 
Before D1 came out, I really didn't have a choice as to which version of D 
to use, but now that D1 has been partially (mostly) stabilized, I'd rather 
stick to it than to the ever-changing D2.