Andrei's Google Talk

[retard]

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:31:18 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> On 08/05/2010 01:23 PM, retard wrote:
>> Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:22:09 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> On 08/04/2010 07:25 PM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
>>>> On 08/04/2010 05:16 PM, Robert Clipsham wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I know of several large apps written in D, they're all D1/Tango.
>>>>
>>>> The incomplete state of D2 has to be the most embarrassing question
>>>> that could have been asked at Andrei's talk, but then you'd have to
>>>> be familiar with D to ask that question. Andrei likes to talk about
>>>> presentations showing only what's good, but he gave a whole talk
>>>> about an incomplete language while hawking his book for said
>>>> language, but made no mention of D1 vs D2.
>>>>
>>>> People often ask for a status, but there never seems to be good
>>>> answers. Where's the roadmap? What's being worked on? What's left to
>>>> fix? Is there a release date that's being worked towards? It used to
>>>> coincide with the release of Andrei's book, but that has come and
>>>> gone.
>>>
>>> Walter is more silent than usual because he's working very hard on the
>>> 64-bit compiler. He hopes to have one by the end of this month. His
>>> next big goal is shared library support.
>>
>> Ok, Walter is working on a 64-bit compiler, then on the shared library
>> support. That's great. But many of us would like to know who is
>>
>>   * managing the communication with the user community * managing the
>>   communication with the language/compiler developers * managing the
>>   bugfixes to the spec
>>   * managing the compiler bugfix release (minor version) process *
>>   managing the language development debate * coordinating the future
>>   language development (roadmap page of the trac) * managing the public
>>   relations with the people outside the core
>> community
>>
>> It seems Walter wants to be a lonely wolf. Nobody else is allowed to do
>> anything listed above unless you're Andrei. There are no managers, we
>> only have experts working with their favorite features and no
>> communication exists between these persons or the community.
> 
> I think this is a gross misrepresentation. Are you sure you're not
> forgetting a lot of contributors? If anything, the trend is toward
> opening the doors to more, not less people.

I understood that all the contributors are waiting for the decision of a 
single person. Walter needs to review all compiler patches, he needs to 
review all patches to the spec, he needs to defend D on reddit, 
newsgroups, and all other forums. He handles the whole release process. 
He doesn't tell anything about future directions so nobody knows about 
them.

The management model doesn't scale when you get more and more 
contributors. At some point Walter won't have enough time to review all 
contributions even if it didn't do anything else.

For example now that he is focusing on 64-bit support, all discussion 
about rewriting the spec, fixing bugs, improving the other parts of the 
toolchain, or developing the language further (D 2.1 or 3.0) has stalled. 
Many people have asked bearophile to stop discussing new language 
features because it takes away too much valuable time from Walter. 
Something is wrong here.