On Friday, 19 December 2014 at 18:58:11 UTC, Joakim wrote:
contributor has their own priorities. The core team can only work on what they think is important and evaluate whether they want others' features or the quality of their pulls, whenever those are provided. Think bazaar, not cathedral.
Bazaar has never worked for design. Linux was not designed, the design was already done with Unix. But even in Linux experimental features are not added over night. They are added when they have been proven mature. Where would Linux be today if they did not focus on stability?
Now, you're right that the core team can do a better job of laying out their current priorities and of having an actual roadmap of where they'd like the project to go, but they can't really do anything to enforce this herd of cats to listen to them.
The goal is not to control what people do, but to sort out the dependencies and coordinate so that people can focus on the area they are interested in with an idea of when extensions could be added and what the missing pieces are.
It makes no commercial sense to invest with no plan for the next two releases and no time estimates,. That means you get contributors that do what they do because it is a hobby, or because it is educational, because they hope to be hired by a company that uses D today, or because some commercial backer "believes" in the project (in the emotional sense).
A company like Intel invests in LLVM and many other open source projects that supports their products… They probably would not if they had no idea when or if those projects would reach a stable production ready release.
