When will D1 be finished?

[Luís Marques]

Walter Bright wrote:
> D1 regularly gets around 20 bug fixes a month. I don't understand why 
> this is not seen as progress to a stable state. About 80% of bug fixes 
> are common to both D2 and D1.

I think my perception (and I accept it may be a perception which does 
not reflect reality at large) comes from issues like the following. It's 
not a particularly important issue, but it's one for which I could find 
a bug report.

Two years ago, I tried to use a particular construct and DMD incorrectly 
detected that a statement was not reachable [1]. OK, D1 had been frozen 
earlier that year, so I thought it would be only a matter of time until 
the higher priority stuff had been taken care of and someone took care 
of this issue. That's my experience with stable languages, even if they 
aren't particularly mainstream (say, Lua).

Two years later I see this issue is still lingering. My perception is 
that unless I nag someone or send a fix myself no one will take care of 
it anytime soon. I guess they just have a huge pile of more important 
stuff, which is fair.

But, 1) how long do you perceive it will take until more pressing 
matters delay fixing these kinds of bugs? I don't know if 20 bug fixes a 
month is enough or not to have DMD v1 rock solid in the next 5 years. 
Are most of the fixes for new bug reports? Is the list of old bugs being 
cleaned at a good rate? My perception, I said, was that the rate was a 
bit disapointing (compared with my experience using other language 
implementations)

2) Even if most bug fixes are common to D1 and D2, isn't it still true 
that if D2 is being discussed, elaborated, documented and implemented, 
most of those activities do not fix bugs and take time away from making 
D1 / DMD v1 stable and with few bugs?

Some say "send a patch". I'll try, when that is possible. But I can't 
send a patch for every bug I find in my spreadsheet software, browser, 
programming language, IM client, etc. That means that much of the 
software I use I have to accept it as is. That applies to everyone which 
uses a large amount of software and is not a programming demigod.