new DIP41: dmd/rdmd command line overhaul.

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 21, 2013 19:14:52 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-05-21 19:01, Walter Bright wrote:
> > I'm conflicted about it!
> 
> D will never be good if we're so afraid of breaking changes.

We need to be willing to make breaking changes when we actually need to make 
them and avoid them when we don't. We're past the point when we can tweak 
everything to improve it. There are too many people using D now and too many 
of them wanting stability for us to continue to make minor tweaks. Breaking 
changes need to provide real value. Unfortunately, in some cases, that means 
being stuck with some things that are less than ideal, but if we're forever 
tweaking everything to improve it, we'll never be stable enough for people to 
be able to depend on us for real work.

I'd _love_ for the command line flags for dmd to be fixed so that they didn't 
use - for multi-character flags and other nonsense like that, but much as I 
think that what we have is sloppy, it still works reasonably well, and dealing 
with compiler flags takes up a very small portion of D development time. So, 
while the situation isn't ideal, I don't think that it's ultimately a big 
deal.

- Jonathan M Davis