Proof of concept for v2 - NO duplication, NO `static if` hell, NO difficulty with interoperability

[bachmeier]

On Monday, 1 November 2021 at 04:44:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Monday, 1 November 2021 at 02:27:21 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> On Monday, 1 November 2021 at 00:05:30 UTC, Andrei 
>> Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>>> Given the above and also the perennial stagnation the D 
>>> library has been in, I'd say it's version or die.
>>
>> I have to admit that at times D feels like Common Lisp. A nice 
>> language for when it was designed, but now one that values 
>> stability over all else, at the expense of building on a good 
>> foundation. The death of Common Lisp was the standard. 
>> Something similar happened at some point for D but without 
>> standardization.
>
> No. The end of Lisp was parentheses and Haskell. The standard 
> made it linger on for several decades beyond reason.

I'm not sure there's been "several decades beyond reason", since 
the standard came out only 27 years ago. The point I was trying 
to make is that the language was stagnant when I used it most 
heavily (maybe 2010-2012). It's useless trying to update pieces 
that are in the standard, and there was no process for updating 
the standard. The result was a boring language frozen in time. 
Matches up nicely with the low-hanging fruit Andrei listed.

> The std lib should be the bottom layer, and small, so you can 
> keep it stable, efficient and provide targeted compiler 
> optimizations.

This is an argument in favor of versioning. V1 can have all those 
properties, and subsequent versions can build on it.