SDC needs you

[Michel Fortin via Digitalmars-d]

On 2015-04-16 06:50:35 +0000, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> said:

> I've been working on the Objective-C support for quite a while. I'm on 
> my third rewrite due to comments in previous pull requests. The latest 
> pull request [1] was created in January, it's basically been stalled 
> since February due to lack of review and Walter has not made a single 
> comment at all in this pull request.
> 
> I did the rewrites to comply with the requests Walter made in previous 
> pull requests. Although not present as a bugzilla issue with the 
> "preapproved" tag, I did interpreted it as preapproved based on a forum 
> post made by you [2].
> 
> I know that focus has shifted to GC, reference counting, C++ and so on, 
> but you're not making it easy for someone to contribute.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/4321
> [2] http://forum.dlang.org/post/lfoe82$17c0$1@digitalmars.com

Back at the time I was working on D/Objective-C, my separate work on a 
feature proposed in pull #3 (that const(Object)ref thing) got a similar 
treatment: no comment from Walter in months. It's time-consuming to 
maintain a complex pull request against a changing master branch, and 
it was abandoned at some point because I got tired of maintaining it 
with no review in sight.

Using Github was a new thing back then, so I didn't necessarily expect 
the review to go smoothly given #3 isn't a trivial change. But getting 
no comment at all made me rethink things. It made me dread a similar 
fate would await D/Objective-C. It was one of the reasons I stopped 
working on it. Now that Jacob has taken over the Herculean task of 
making it work with current DMD after a few years of falling behind and 
of refactoring it as a series of pull requests by sub-feature to make 
it easier to review, I fear more and more it'll get the same treatment 
as #3, ignored by Walter for several months (that's where we are now) 
and then abandoned (when Jacob patience and/or spare time runs out).

It would be sad to see all those efforts wasted.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca