On 11/28/2012 12:48 PM, Manu wrote:
If D stabilised on exactly the feature set it offers right now (or even 3 months
ago), I wouldn't be interested. The lowest level is brittle, and the high level
is still missing a couple of little details (rvalues -> ref is the key one for
me).
D's fluidity is actually one of it's biggest selling points as far as I'm
concerned. D seems to accept that mistakes can be fixed and improvements can be
made, and it should embrace that to an extent, or you end up with C++ long term.
I think the best approach is one that others have suggested, 2 branches,
'stable' which is maintained for 6-12 months, and only receives non-breaking
fixes after they've been tested for a while, and 'dev', which users accept may
receive breaking changes at any time. Those users will be happy to adapt their
code as the language moves forward, as I am.
I'd agree but with one caveat -- how do you handle the case of the standard
library, or indeed any other library?
Obviously, every library developer can choose between maintaining a version that
works with stable only; maintaining a stable and 'bleeding-edge' version; or
just bleeding edge. Presumably for Phobos you'd choose the second of these.
But then, how do you handle _new_ functionality that may or may not depend on
breaking changes to the language?
Given that Phobos is still a moving target with new functionality being added on
a regular basis, it could be a bit of a disappointment to have to wait as long
as 6 months to see the latest new features.
The same also applies to the downstream compilers like GDC and LDC -- it would
be frustrating to have to wait so long to see new functionality available here.
One way to handle that might be to first do the work to properly separate out
the frontend, so that updates can be merged immediately into GDC/LDC's dev
versions rather than having to wait for each release.
Finally, even in dev I think it would be useful to still have some formal notice
of deprecation, so that there's time to anticipate changes. I'd rather not just
wake up one morning and find that my code no longer compiles!
