How much time will D1 be around?

[Frits van Bommel]

Ary Borenszweig wrote:
> Now that D2 is being developed, I don't know how much time it will take 
> until it is finished. Once it is, what will happen to D1? Will anyone 
> still use it?

I think I might keep using it for a while yet. D2 has some features I 
dislike. On the other hand, some others are very tempting...

> I ask this because from time to time I like to add new features to 
> Descent to improve D1 support. Semantic analysis is pretty done for D1, 
> except for some bugs that are hard to fix, or at least take a lot of 
> time. :-P

Well, some places I'm still really missing semantic analysis in Descent:
* Nested functions (their bodies don't seem to get analyzed)
* Mixins (functions defined by (string) mixins don't get highlighting, 
don't show up in code completion, etc.)

Or are those the "hard to fix"/"take a lot of time" cases? (Or fixed in 
trunk but not up on the update site?)

> For D2, there's still missing a lot of semantic analysis porting from 
> DMD, and doing that is kind of boring (adding new features, that's fun). 
> But if I add features to D1 and it will be gone soon, what's the point? 

The features I mentioned above are in D2 as well as in D1, so it's not 
necessarily either/or... ;)

> Also, I feel that the great majority of the people here don't see an IDE 
> as a helpful programming tool.

It's certainly very helpful to me. Though Eclipse does tend to use a lot 
of memory here, so sometimes I get frustrated and revert to Scite for a 
while.

> But, in another point of view, I see a lot of big differences between D1 
> and D2. For instance, I don't like const/invariant, I don't care about 
> that, I never had bugs or trouble or performance problems because of 
> mutability problems, so I consider D1 easier to grasp. So I wonder if 
> anyone else thinks "No matter what will happen, I'll probably just stick 
> with D1".

At the very least, I'll still be using D1 for several projects I don't 
intend to port in any case unless D1 support is dropped entirely. Old 
projects need bugfixes too.

> What do you think about all this?

See above.