Who favors the current D1 situation?

[Aarti_pl]

Saaa pisze:
> If all the changes are non breaking ones and if it doesn't take any 
> significant time to port them, why then are people still against it?
> 
> Why does everybody keep pointing out that other things need fixing.
> That is irrelevant, if porting the extra feature to D1 won't take any time.
> 
> I would applaud any feature coming to the stable D1 branch.
> Everybody should be warned that D2 might break at any release, but D1 can 
> safely be used and when lucky it will even be improved without breaking 
> older D1 code (its like giving away presents).


I see two important problems with backporting new features from D 2.0 
into D 1.0 branch:

1. Porting bigger chunks of code can introduce new bugs into 1.0 branch. 
Please note that 2.0 is not tested as well as 1.0, so it is more than 
probable that it will happen. Also it is possible that some of new 
features can interact with other features (old or new ones) so it will 
make porting a headache: you will always have to think what should be 
ported to make the whole thing working in 1.0.

2. Semantics of new features in D 2.0 branch can change until 3.0 branch 
will be crated. It basically means that, when new features will be 
continuously ported to D 1.0, then 1.0 branch will no more be stable. 
You will not be able to create any program in D 1.0 (using new features) 
and be sure that it won't break in future, because this features can be 
changed later.

In my opinion there is not much sense in porting 2.0 compiler features 
into 1.0 branch. Also creating branch 1.5 does not make much sense for 
me. If I would like to use all new features of D, I would just use 2.0 
branch. That said, I really appreciate effort of porting Phobos 2.0 into 
1.0 (std2 project in dsource). Some of new features of Phobos 2.0 are 
really useful, and Phobos 1.0 badly lacks them.

Best Regards
Marcin Kuszczak
(aarti_pl)