On Tuesday, 19 October 2021 at 14:48:20 UTC, Tejas wrote:
On Tuesday, 19 October 2021 at 13:53:04 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
I this specific case, I agree completely. But there is a
broader pattern in D of projects getting "stuck" because a
specific individual is unable to continue work on them (e.g.,
std.experimental.allocator and Andrei), and I think it is
worth considering whether we can do anything to make future
projects robust against this mode of failure.
The obvious solution is more people who get paid to work on D
the language/stdlib/rt-env full-time. Where to get money to pay
those individuals? Well there's no obvious solution to that
(that I know of).
We can say community, but, like the vision documents, they will
be a bust because one can't _make_ volunteers meet deadlines,
code in a particular way, or incorporate all feedback language
maintainers think should be acted on.
That would help. But also, I think there are probably steps we
could take that would make it easier for people other than the
original author to pick up existing stalled projects and help
move them towards completion.
To return to the `std.experimental.allocator` example: there are
many people in the community who'd be happy to contribute towards
getting it moved out of `experimental`. The problem is, nobody
knows what needs to be done, or what the criteria are to consider
the project "finished." If the original author(s) had written
down, say, a design document and a TODO list, and posted them
somewhere publicly visible (maybe the D Wiki?), we would not have
this problem.
