Version Identifiers for Platforms / Architectures not supported by DMD

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, November 06, 2011 16:17:59 Walter Bright wrote:
> And finally, there is no such thing as a "sane" version identifier scheme.
> For one thing, OS vendors do not pick sane names. OS/2 is not an
> identifier. Neither is OS X. Nor is GNU/Linux. Nor do the OS vendors pick
> any sane identifiers for their own systems (look at what Sun did).
> 
> Even if someone comes up with a naming scheme for D that most agree is sane,
> intuitive, and attractive, switching to it would again silently break a
> large swath of existing D code. D cannot advance by constantly breaking
> things.

I think that what it comes down to is that most D programmers are looking for 
consistency and don't care what C is doing with its version identifiers. You 
have to look up what they are regardless, since even if you know the C 
identifiers and you know that D is trying to follow them, there's still no 
guarantee that they're the same. It may not be worth making breaking changes 
(e.g. changing linux to Linux) at this point, but at minimum, I'd argue that 
new version identifiers should be more consistent. And I believe that some have 
argued in the pas that we should just add Linux to make it consistent, but 
leave linux to avoid code breakage (which has the upside of increasing 
consistency but the downside of creating two version identifiers for the same 
thing).

- Jonathan M Davis