Windows experience is atrocious

[harakim]

On Wednesday, 26 July 2023 at 18:15:18 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> It will make the compiler more complex to maintain, certainly.  
> But *something* has to be done... otherwise nothing is going to 
> change and the D ecosystem is going to remain small forever.

What specific advantages would you get in requiring every file to 
have a version as opposed to a compiler flag that can be passed 
in via the build tool like dub? I feel like a project is usually 
worked on as a version. I don't know a lot about linking but it 
seems like you could build each dependency with its own version 
and link them with rare exceptions. That would make it easier to 
use and also to retrofit old projects you come across than 
manually updating every file.

If you think per file is the way to go, then what if instead of 
defaulting to say 2.105 forever, it defaulted to the latest 
LTS/major version. And then if you wanted to compile older stuff 
that no longer compiles, it could just use the old compiler. I 
don't think it would be a high bar to have people download 
multiple versions of the compiler. It could be included in the 
default download perhaps. I always have several JDKs and usually 
even a few versions of Visual Studio.

Also, I agree that this wouldn't make sense retroactively. I was 
thinking if we have 100 versions now, then one day we will 
probably have 100 more.

I appreciate you taking the time to walk me through this because 
it's giving me a lot of peace of mind and I think you're 
definitely on to something.