Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, January 19, 2012 14:59:54 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-01-19 11:11, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 1/19/2012 2:06 AM, Patrick Stewart wrote:
> >> Long story short - I find new things added and premature optimizations
> >> The
> >> worst enemy of language at the moment. They might look like selling
> >> point to
> >> you, to me they look like distractions from fixing D's shaking legs
> >> and
> >> solving some real problems underneath.
> > 
> > Take a look at the D changelog.
> > 
> > https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/d-programming-language.org/blo
> > b/master/changelog.dd
> > 
> > 
> > I just don't see how it can be argued that we aren't doing exactly what
> > you suggest we do.
> 
> Take a look at the latest commits, the language is not frozen. You have
> recently added support for SIMD and a new lambda syntax (which I really
> like BTW).

The language isn't frozen, but it's close. Almost all of the language changes 
at this point are backwards compatible. And I don't think that it necessarily 
ever makes sense to say that we won't make backwards compatible changes 
anymore. The issue is that we need to try and resolve any further issues that 
require non-backwards compatible changes sooner rather than later and that we 
need to get the compiler stabilized to the point that it can be reasonably 
used for fulltime development without fear of compiler bugs making that 
infeasible.

We're getting there, and aside from tangents such as SIMD, the only thing that 
I can think of that could be done better (aside from somehow fixing bugs 
faster) is to focus more on some of the more critical bugs - such as TDPL bugs 
and major bugs which prevent major features working properly (such as const-
related issues). But that's been improving as well of late, if perhaps not 
always as quickly as would be nice.

- Jonathan M Davis