Walter and Andrei and community relationship management

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 4/14/2017 7:27 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> Even allowing for the fact that changes to the language definition should face a
> high bar (made higher by the general wish for non-breaking changes), that
> suggests that the 'champion'-based approach may run into difficulties when it
> comes to more fundamental contributions to the D language.

Fundamentally changing the language is a major undertaking. The language is 
complicated, there's a lot of baggage, and the reason things are the way they 
are is usually unclear. Having a handwavy post proposing such things is just not 
good enough.

It's a fact of life that 99% (made up number) of fundamental language change 
proposals are going to fail. What an intractable mess D would be if the daily 
stream of language proposals were implemented. I have more than enough trouble 
with regressions caused by previous language changes.

Nevertheless, if you peruse the PRs, a number of language changes have been made 
by various champions. There is the way import lookups are done now - a change 
implemented by myself and Martin, but proposed by others. The way Ddoc works has 
been altered significantly by others, such as having runnable embedded example 
code. Kenji made many subtle changes to how templates work.

I read deadalnix's posts. I pointed out major unaddressed issues, like how does 
it deal with an application using multiple independent methods of allocating memory.

If you or anyone else want to self-select as the champion for it to make it more 
complete, that's how things work. I work every day trying to keep D moving - I 
spent yesterday updating the /dmd/samples so they work again, nobody else wanted 
to do it. I also spent much time yesterday figuring out why Windows DLL support 
broke again. Nobody else was going to do that. I simply cannot turn every idea 
posted here into a detailed proposal.

Keep in mind that other languages, such as C++, will not even look at any 
proposals that are not detailed and complete. And that's just the start of a 
pretty brutal winnowing process. Their position is that if the proponent of a 
change is not willing to put in the work to make a detailed proposal, why should 
it be worth their time to investigate it? It can't work any other way.