I wish to add a little of why Mehrdad's complaints are very
important. I think the delay is a good, over releasing 2.058 two
days later.
Most in the community have chosen what they will use of D, they
know of some issues (no multiple alias this), or don't know how
best to use something (concurrency).
In our marketing for the language we express how great
such-and-such is, but know that problems will be found by those
that use it. We could not mention concurrency and how
immutable/const plays its rule, but we need to answer what is
different from D1 and how the future of computing will be easier
in D.
Interestingly Mehrdad has chosen something which does basically
nothing, the const system. Const isn't important at _all_, except
that it is a pillar for our functional concurrent purity. We
claim a language that makes an immutable and mutable world
coexist. Yet the implementation doesn't back that up.
So why should we probably finish fixing up const, over say the
multiple alias this, @safe, or no GC use? Because it is what will
be touched by new users the most. You tell people how great
mixing immutable and mutable is, they're going to give it a try.
You pull users over from C++ or other languages with
non-transitive const, they are going to use const as they do in
that language without reading about how D does it. These people
aren't going to be using const correctly in D, they couldn't
possibly know how to. When they complain, we explain what is
wrong and how they should be using it, but when they do start
using it correctly (because they won't listen to our "don't use
const yet" message) they will still fail to get it right because
implementation doesn't support it.
We need to be able to prove transitive const is easy to work with
and worth it. Transitive const is hard to see how it works, but
no GC and explaining multiple alias this is simple to understand.
And @safe D is not what brings people to D.
There was a concentration on TDPL bugs before the book came out,
lets bring that back and get them done for 2.058:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&short_desc=tdpl&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr
What do you say team?
