When will D1 be finished?

[Tomas Lindquist Olsen]

2009/5/12 Luís Marques <luismarques at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>

I think this is pretty spot on. The point is not that D1 isn't getting
bugfixes, it's which bugs are actually fixed. I realise I've done my
part of the whining now and in the past, something I'm going to try
and change (by fixing bugs myself and sending patches), but ...

I don't know anyone who tried out D seriously who haven't found some
near-deal-breaking bug (most of the time already reported), which
requires them to implement workarounds that often make some otherwise
neat (and according to spec, value) design impossible.

It's a huge demotivator.

-Tomas

P.S. I know we can vote for issues now, that's a really good
development and has helped already, but the situation is still not
perfect.