On 9/23/2014 11:28 PM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
1. Constant rejection of improvements because "OMG breaking change!". Meanwhile, D has been breaking my code on practically every release for years. I don't get this, reject changes that are deliberately breaking changes which would make significant improvements, but allow breaking changes anyway because they are bug fixes? If the release breaks code, then accept that fact and make some real proper breaking changes that make D substantially better! It is my opinion that D adopters don't adopt D because it's perfect just how it is and they don't want it to improve with time, they adopt D *because they want it to improve with time*! That implies an acceptance (even a welcoming) of breaking changes.
What change in particular?
2. Tooling is still insufficient. I use Visual Studio, and while VisualD is good, it's not great. Like almost all tooling projects, there is only one contributor, and I think this trend presents huge friction to adoption. Tooling is always factored outside of the D community and their perceived realm of responsibility. I'd like to see tooling taken into the core community and issues/bugs treated just as seriously as issues in the compiler/language itself. 3. Debugging is barely ever considered important. I'd love to see a concerted focus on making the debug experience excellent. Iain had a go at GDB, I understand there is great improvement there. Sadly, we recently lost the developer of Mago (a Windows debugger). There's lots of work we could do here, and I think it's of gigantic impact.
There are 23 issues tagged with 'symdeb': https://issues.dlang.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=symdeb&list_id=109316&resolution=--- If there are more untagged ones, please tag them.
4. 'ref' drives me absolutely insane. It seems so trivial, but 6 years later, I still can't pass an rvalue->ref (been discussed endlessly), create a ref local, and the separation from the type system makes it a nightmare in generic code. This was a nuisance for me on day-1, and has been grinding me down endlessly for years. It has now far eclipsed my grudges with the GC/RC, or literally anything else about the language on account of frequency of occurrence; almost daily.
I have to ask why all your code revolves about this one thing?
