On Sunday, 29 May 2016 at 17:35:35 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Unlike Python, we wouldn't be maintaining a "with auto-decoding" fork for years and years and years, ensuring nobody ever had a pressing reason to bother migrating.
If it happens, they better. The D1 fork was maintained for almost three years for a good reason.
Heck, we weather breaking fixes enough anyway.
Not nearly on a scale similar to changing how strings are iterated; not since the D1/D2 split.
It was an annoying pain (at least to me), but I got through it fine and never even entertained the thought of just sticking with the old compiler. Not sure most people even noticed it. Point is, in D, even when something does need to change, life goes on fine. As long as we don't maintain a long-term fork ;)
The problem is not active users. The problem is companies who have > 10K LOC and libraries that are no longer maintained. E.g. It took Sociomantic eight years after D2's release to switch only a few parts of their projects to D2. With the loss of old libraries/old code (even old answers on SO), all of a sudden you lose a lot of the network effect that makes programming languages much more useful.
