On 14.12.2011 05:37, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/13/11 10:12 PM, Don wrote:
On 13.12.2011 17:00, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/13/11 7:52 AM, Don wrote:
On 10.12.2011 22:19, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
In order to increase focus and unity in the language, we are
discontinuing support for D1 on December 31, 2012. That's more than
one
year away, which gives enough time to D1 users to migrate libraries
and
applications to D2.
I thought we had moved away from these kinds of unilateral decisions.
I strongly oppose this decision. In particlar, I find the lack of
community consulatation deplorable.
Apologies for this being so sudden. This was deliberate as there would
have been no way to achieve consensus in the matter. People prefer
having choices and postponement options, and are generous with others'
time.
Allow me to recap the reasons why I think this is a necessary move.
1. We can't serve two masters. Working on two languages at the same time
was non-committal and artificially sustained a rift in the community.
The rift was created and sustained by unilateral statements like this
one. Abandoning half the community doesn't help.
There is no abandonment. Also, where is that 50/50 estimate from? Just
curious.
The D2 community is definitely bigger than the D1 community. But how
much more?
It's hard to be sure, but the Tango users used to be 75% of the
community, based on a few polls that were held, but they never had much
representation on the ng. I guess between half and 2/3 are gone now.
I don't think the entire D community is as big as it was back then
(based on number of public repositories).
Additionally, the number of contributors, and level of activity, in
Tango, was higher than Phobos has ever had.
It also diffused our focus, delayed us to an ever-increasing extent,
What on earth gives you that idea? The only resources involved are some
fraction of Walter's time, which is obviously an important resource, but
nobody other than Walter is affected.
Walter told me so, and Walter is the single most important bottleneck.
So "us" means Walter?
You're seriously misrepresenting
the situation.
What is an accurate representation of the situation, and what evidence
is there to back that up?
This is an issue of Walter's time, and nothing more. I think the
evidence for that is clear -- who else is spending time on D1?
Important thing to notice: GDC and LDC also have D1 compilers. Does this
decision apply to them?
I spend some time on fixing D1 bugs, but that won't change, see below.
and
sent the wrong message out that we're lacking confidence of what our
core thrust is, so we're trying to sort of please everyone. ("Here's our
flagship language! If you don't like it, well, we have another one.")
This is a silly and offensive statement. Most languages are in this
situation. Look at Python2 vs Python3, Perl6 vs Perl5.
I wonder who would be offended by that.
Other than me? Well, I think the Python guys would be offended if you
said it of them.
2. The deadline is more than a year away. This is a long time, enough
for us to make D2 compelling, and also for interested people to migrate.
No, it's an exceedingly short timeframe.
Other vendors give similar time scale for much larger migrations.
Only when the migration is to a mature product.
What gives you the idea that
nobody is using D1?
There is not one sentence in my message claiming nobody is using D1.
Ok, I can't make sense of it otherwise.
Don, it is you who is misrepresenting the situation, and repeatedly. I
understand you find this frustrating, but please, let's have a
constructive dialog.
Have you thought about what would convince them to
switch to D2, and what would be required for them to do it?
I think the most important aspect for them would be completion of
Tango's port to D2. The recent progress in the matter is encouraging. If
the D1 community is sizable, resourceful, and interested, I believe that
to be within the realm of possibility.
At the present time, do they actually desire to move to D2? If not, why
not? And the big one: are they confident that D2 is sufficiently stable?
I suspect you don't know much about the D1 community. (Note that only a
small fraction of D users have ever used the newsgroup, and it's mostly
people with an interest in language design. They are not representative).
I can already say with certainty that I will still be using D1 in 2013.
That's great. The decision does not make it impossible or even
particularly difficult for D1 users to continue using D1. Since there
were near zero bug reports on D1,
There are 400 open bugzilla D1 + common D1/D2 compiler bugs in Bugzilla,
including nearly all of the heavily voted bugs. D1 is very much more
stable than D2 (D2 has 800 open bugs), so there are far fewer bug reports.
If you mean, there were no bug reports on the beta, that's not
suprising, there are no D1 Phobos changes, which is where regressions
mostly show up.
they can be assumed to be content with
the quality of the compiler. Really I don't see the gist of the
complaint. This is not abandonment.
You, Andrei, are personally making a decision which affects the entire
community. I'm actually a bit shocked that you've done this.
Especially since there was a big public discussion on the D internals
newsgroup (Nov 10) about reducing the pressure of Walter's time.
---------
Kenji:
> Today only Walter improvements D1 branch. Almost dmd pulls only
> consider D2 branch. Should we add D1 patch at the same time?
Walter:
Merging with D1 hasn't been too difficult; I use a program called "meld"
which makes it a snap.
...
It usually takes a couple hours to merge a patch, if things go smoothly.
Most of that is running the test suite. Some more time is spent updating
the changelog and bugzilla.
----
So, didn't sound then as though D1 was a big issue. Yet a month later
you announce you've made a private decision about axing D1.
Feels exactly like a military coup.
