On Friday, 28 November 2014 at 23:33:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
[snip]
I know there's been a lot of "break my code" advocacy lately,
but this code was only 2 years old.
I fully understand how unfriendly this is to users and how
discouraging it can be to have their recently working code
shattered and scattered. We need to do a lot better.
With every new release of Visual Studio I expect things to break.
Every release I'm right. Every release I spend a day fixing our
build for the new Visual Studio. After that I get to enjoy a much
nicer compiler (and IDE). Switching from gcc to clang had some
sore points but it was well worth the change. Moving to C++11
involved quite a bit of work but again, totally worth it.
There is only 2-3 years (and now annual) between Visual Studio
releases yet stuff still breaks. This is with C++ where you
expect rigid backward compatibility. I have no expectation of
that with D (as much as we'd all like to stamp it "stable" for
marketing purposes).
If a project is stagnant (no updates in years) I have no
delusions that it will work without issue using the latest
compilers/interpreters (regardless of language). It's a nice
fantasy to think we could have it that way but it just doesn't
exist.
