Send me your list of D gripes and wishes

[Jonathan Marler]

On Saturday, 24 December 2022 at 23:22:47 UTC, ag0aep6g wrote:
> On Saturday, 24 December 2022 at 19:53:34 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
>> Your report was not ignored.
>
> I didn't say it was.
>
>> It's that changing it would break existing code, something I 
>> get routinely excoriated about.
>
> You use that excuse a lot, and it rarely truly applies. It 
> doesn't apply here. People complain when you break their valid 
> code. They don't complain when you make their buggy code fail 
> to compile. Or rather: If someone complains about that, you 
> should ignore them.
>
>> The -mv switch was added to deal with this problem, and is 
>> mentioned in the comments on the issue.
>>
>> https://dlang.org/dmd-windows.html#switch-mv
>
> That linked documentation is buggy itself. "path/filename" is 
> missing in the syntax line. Someone should fix that, or at 
> least file an issue. Not me though.
>
> Also, that switch seems to be meant to ease the transition for 
> when the bug gets fixed. But the bug hasn't been fixed.
>
>> There have also been two PRs by marler8997 about it.
>>
>> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/7778
>> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/7878
>>
>> though I'm not sure why he closed the second.
>
> Really? Andrei argued against fixing the issue. Jonathan simply 
> accepted that. Andrei was wrong, of course, but we can't blame 
> Jonathan for yielding to the (supposedly benevolent) dictator.
>
> For me, dealing with D's leadership has been an infuriating 
> experience time and time again. It's the one reason why I have 
> dialed back my contributions to near zero. There is a lot to 
> fix in D, but when I have to fight for the privilege of 
> cleaning up after you guys while you refuse to even recognize 
> your own bugs, that's just not worth it.
>
> I can't say for sure that Jonathan Marler stepped away for the 
> same reason, but I am sure that poor handling of contributors 
> has cost D a lot of talent.

PR #7878 fixed a discrepency between "dmd -c main.d foo.d" and 
"dmd -c main.d && dmd -c foo.d". Andrei didn't think this 
discrepency was worth fixing. I was dumbfounded by this response 
and still am to this day.

I have alot of memories like this one from when I use to try to 
fix issues with D. I have a passion about my tools being correct, 
but, I found myself spending more time arguing with people than 
writing code. It was miserable.

Now I'm able to spend time doing what I love, writing 
robust-maintainable software with good tooling. When there's an 
issue with my toolchain, I'm able to submit a fix and it gets 
merged. It's night and day for me. I don't understand why there's 
was always so much disagreement/resistance when I contributed to 
D, I suppose I may never know. No hard feelings though, hope 
y'all are doing well.