Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, January 14, 2012 20:54:55 Michel Fortin wrote:
> Still, Walter perfectly has the right to decide on what he wants to
> work. I understand that he saw implementing SIMD as an interesting
> challenge, and if working on SIMD keeps things interesting for him,
> that can only be great.

Sure. I can understand why the most important thing to work  on might not be 
the most interesting thing to work on. And Walter certainly has the right to 
work on whatever he wants to work on. It could even be that if the more 
important stuff is tedious enough, working on something new and interesting 
could make it so that Walter is able to make progress on the more important 
stuff more quickly when he does work on it. But from the perspective of the 
language and community at large, SIMD support is great to have but not at all 
the thing that we need the most.

Regardless, I don't wish to make a big deal about it. I was just echoing 
Andrei's sentiment that there are more important things to be working on than 
SIMD support right now.

> Fixing long standing bugs is boring stuff compared to that. Yes it's
> important, but does it needs to be Walter doing it? Even for an issue
> requiring a language change, couldn't someone design the language
> change, implements it, and create a pull request for it? Then it'd be
> up to Walter to look at it, ask for amendments, then accept it or
> reject it…
> 
> Looks good in theory, but in practice this approach hasn't worked very
> well for pull request number 3.

It seems that the problem is that while Walter can be saved effort by having 
someone else do that kind of work, it doesn't necessarily save him all that 
much effort, since he still must ultimately take the time to fully understand 
what's being changed and what the implications are before he merges it in. And 
the ramifications of pull request #3 are larger than most, so it makes sense if 
it takes longer for it to be sorted out. Still, given the importance of pull 
request #3, I would have thought that it would have been handled much sooner 
than this. It's getting very close to being a year old.

- Jonathan M Davis