Give me a break

[Sjoerd van Leent]

Jason House Wrote:

> Walter Bright Wrote:
> 
> > If there's more I can do to make this work, I would like to know what 
> > that is.
> 
> I know D does not burden itself with backwards compatibility, but the lack of compatibility has to affect many D projects. There are many D1-only projects that can't be used within D2. When D3 is  started, will we have even more incompatible choices? I have no solution to this issue, but it deserves some thought.
> 
> In the past, I proposed the idea of forward compatibility which would allow a D1 compiler to ignore D2-specific keywords and other minor semantic differences such as invariant()... The idea wasn't 100% compatibility, but rather to allow writing a reasonable subset of D2 that could compile in D1. Maybe a 3rd party tool to do the translation is enough?

I would consider this hardly practical. D1 can't know how D2 is going to be like. D2 can't know how D3 is going to be like. And so on. I would really not like to see a D3 emerging right after D2. To get the language mainstream, we need to focus on one version of it, and stick to that. Together with what it lacks. That way, LDC, GDC and D.NET can get a chance to align, and libraries can get themselves to align. Only when D(2) is fully up and running, with a larger userbase, it is practical to start concidering slight changes to the language in the form of RFCs.