backporting features to D1

[Bent Rasmussen]

D 1 obsolete? I don't get it. Walter has a point, it's about everybody's 
personal wish-list.

Of course you do have a point that there's probably a couple of features 
that would make D 1 more homogeneous and complete, but no language is ever 
really complete, except for, say - brainfuck.

- Bent


"Bill Baxter" <wbaxter at gmail.com> skrev i meddelelsen 
news:mailman.77.1223717588.3087.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 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