D1 to be discontinued on December 31, 2012

[Robert Clipsham]

On 14/12/2011 09:46, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/14/11 2:30 AM, Don wrote:
>> On 14.12.2011 05:37, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> There is no abandonment. Also, where is that 50/50 estimate from? Just
>>> curious.
>>
>> The D2 community is definitely bigger than the D1 community. But how
>> much more?
>
> I presume it's quite a bit larger. But then both are small, and we're
> interested in the potential and the rate of adoption.
>
>> It's hard to be sure, but the Tango users used to be 75% of the
>> community, based on a few polls that were held, but they never had much
>> representation on the ng. I guess between half and 2/3 are gone now.
>
> That seems a reasonable assessment. Possibly even more left.
>
>> I don't think the entire D community is as big as it was back then
>> (based on number of public repositories).
>
> That is also entirely possible.
>
>> Additionally, the number of contributors, and level of activity, in
>> Tango, was higher than Phobos has ever had.
>
> Agreed.
>
> But this is all missing the mark - why would we cry over spilled milk.
> The point is assessing the state of affairs the minute before the
> announcement. How active was Tango? How active were the Tango forums?
> Where were other forums of the D1 community? In this day and age, I'd be
> hard-pressed to think of an active programming language community that
> has no online presence whatsoever.
>
> To add to that, there was no trickle of bug reports or pull requests for
> D1, although clearly D1 does have its bugs and issues. I haven't
> followed Tango closely, but if D1 had a large active community, Tango
> would receive a lot of attention from its users as it's the de facto
> standard library for D1. Yet the last post
> (http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/forums/topic/903) dates from
> March 30. The intervals between changes to the trunk
> (http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/changeset/5691/) are measured in
> months.
>
> I hope you'll agree that one would be hard-pressed to infer from the
> evidence there is that there's a large, active, and thriving D1 community.

Many of the active contributors to Tango and other D1 projects (millions 
of lines of code in total) have completely abandoned D now, moving back 
to C, C++, Java, and other languages.

Why?

See the many posts at: http://h3.gd/devlog/
And also: http://www.jfbillingsley.com/blog/?p=53

These issues are why they left D. Notice how they're not just D1 
problems, for the most part, they still exist with D2 (progress has been 
made with some of the issues). Some issues I've pulled out (by no means 
all of them, see the above posts for more info):

* OPTLINK/OMF/The horrific windows situation
* The GC
* .di files
* forward references/cyclic imports
* Long standing bugs with patches, lots of votes and no fix applied
* Decisions being made with NO community input. Cough.

Things have been changing rapidly since the move to github, and many 
things that drove them away are being worked on, but still... They 
didn't migrate to D2 because it wasn't remotely stable, and D1 still 
wasn't (isn't!) finished. D2 still isn't stable/complete, and has 
inherited many issues from pre-D1.

I really hope it is before you kill off D1.

-- 
Robert
http://octarineparrot.com/