Walter Bright wrote:
D1 regularly gets around 20 bug fixes a month. I don't understand why this is not seen as progress to a stable state. About 80% of bug fixes are common to both D2 and D1.
I think my perception (and I accept it may be a perception which does not reflect reality at large) comes from issues like the following. It's not a particularly important issue, but it's one for which I could find a bug report.
Two years ago, I tried to use a particular construct and DMD incorrectly detected that a statement was not reachable [1]. OK, D1 had been frozen earlier that year, so I thought it would be only a matter of time until the higher priority stuff had been taken care of and someone took care of this issue. That's my experience with stable languages, even if they aren't particularly mainstream (say, Lua).
Two years later I see this issue is still lingering. My perception is that unless I nag someone or send a fix myself no one will take care of it anytime soon. I guess they just have a huge pile of more important stuff, which is fair.
But, 1) how long do you perceive it will take until more pressing matters delay fixing these kinds of bugs? I don't know if 20 bug fixes a month is enough or not to have DMD v1 rock solid in the next 5 years. Are most of the fixes for new bug reports? Is the list of old bugs being cleaned at a good rate? My perception, I said, was that the rate was a bit disapointing (compared with my experience using other language implementations)
2) Even if most bug fixes are common to D1 and D2, isn't it still true that if D2 is being discussed, elaborated, documented and implemented, most of those activities do not fix bugs and take time away from making D1 / DMD v1 stable and with few bugs?
Some say "send a patch". I'll try, when that is possible. But I can't send a patch for every bug I find in my spreadsheet software, browser, programming language, IM client, etc. That means that much of the software I use I have to accept it as is. That applies to everyone which uses a large amount of software and is not a programming demigod.
