On Wednesday, 15 November 2023 at 02:27:42 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:
I just want to echo Steve's sentiment, that it should be easy for new (and old) D users to start up a project without worrying about editions. Reducing friction is incredibly important for adoption and usage. If the library writer specifies the 'edition' within their own module and it's totally encapsulated, that seems fine -- I think that is what I understand from the editions proposal (and if they don't specify the edition, it defaults to whatever the compilers default edition is).
It's just like any other language feature you have to learn. The documentation will be clearly divided by edition. You'll have one section for the base language (the default edition) and one for each subsequent edition. You can jump in an use the default language without caring about editions. Then when you want to learn more, say sumtypes and tuples from edition N, the documentation, tutorials, and example code you see should make it very clear that you need to specify edition N. And the documentation for edition N will explain all the changes that edition makes.
If someone misses all of that and tries to use tuples without specifying edition N, the compiler should be able to tell them what the problem is, how to solve it (annotate your module declaration with `@edition(N)`), and provide the URL to the relevant documentation.
The problem with changing the default for each compiler version means in effect there is no default, and downloading any new version means potential breakage that requires extra steps to fix, whether you're a beginner or not. We want to eliminate the need for extra steps.
