backporting features to D1

[Bill Baxter]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 4:44 PM, Bent Rasmussen
<IncredibleShrinkingSphere at gmail.com> wrote:
> Really, it doesn't make any sense to mutate 1.0 into 2.0. There are separate
> language specifications and implementations. As Walter writes, use D 2.0 -
> or make do with D 1.0 until D 2.0 is baked and implemented. I would imagine
> his time would better spent actually making D 2.0 than injecting D 2.0 into
> "D 1.0".

Walter has said before when this topic came up that it would be
trivial for him to back-port such features to D 1.0.  I also thought
that the time required was the real blocker, but he said no.
According to him the desire to make D 1.0 stable is the reason for not
porting them.

Porting proven, non-breaking D2.0 features to D1.0 would *not* mutate
D1.0 into D2.0.  Const stuff would never be ported to D1.0, for
instance because there's really no way to do it without breaking
existing D1 code.  And since we're talking about porting proven,
backwards-compatible features, it still means D1.0 is significantly
more stable than D2.

For me, D2 is too wild-west (the talk recently has been especially so
-- getting rid of "new" and "delete"!), but D1 is way too stagnant.
The cut-off for what became D1 was really arbitrary.  It wasn't like
the last big "todo" on some list got checked off and D 1.0 was "done".
 No, it was more like, "we should call it 1.0 at some point here so we
can make a big announcement and get some new users with the
slashvertisement that results".  Ok maybe it wasn't so blatant, but
the point was definitely made that some people will refuse to use a
language with a version less than 1.0, so we should label it 1.0 to
get those people to give it a look.

I think there was some hope that making a really stable D1.0 would
somehow make D1.0 an attractive choice for companies.  But come on.
It was a stretch when D1 was just a niche language.  Now it's a niche
language that's also obsolete.  What company would want to jump on
that ship?  (Ok, I'm sure the answer is non-zero, but I just don't
think it's anywhere near as significant as the number of companies or
users who would like to see new non-breaking features in D1.  If
they're going to use D at all it's because they believe that
productivity gains or fun of using D outweigh the disadvantages of
lack of libraries, lack of tools, lack of programmers.)

That's my 2￥ anyway.
--bb