Top 5

[bearophile]

Andrei Alexandrescu:
> Ok, per Aarti's suggestion: without speaking officially for Walter, let 
> me ask this - what do you think are the top issues you'd like to see 
> fixed in D?

I'll give only one answer instead of five.

The single most important issue isn't about D itself, like silly details like replacing "invariant" with "immutable", but in its development process. Once you have fixed that, all or most issues with D will be eventually fixed, or they will have a chance to be eventually fixed.

I am not a fanatic of the Open Source philosophy, I use proprietary programs too, and I often like them, I generally don't use Linux. But the single biggest problem with D is that it's partially closed source still, or it smells like that. GDC doesn't change this fact much.

Tango is better than Phobos not because its string functions are faster, but because a community of people is working on it. It's not perfect, but I am sure lot of problems will be fixed, and it will improve. Tango is an example of open source project, and it's healthy. The DMD compiler and the development of the D language are wrong, because they aren't community-driven, people aren't fixing many bugs. Most bug fixes come from a single person. If you look at Python you can see a healthy development process, even when the only developers where Guido and one friend of him.

Until the development process of D doesn't become more open souce, like Tango, D will not solve its main problem.

There's a risk, of course, that making D community-driven will make it try to go in a thousand different directions at the same time. Well, I think that risk may be avoided in some ways, and I think it may lead to less problems than the current ones anyway.

Bye,
bearophile