Ary Borenszweig wrote:
Now that D2 is being developed, I don't know how much time it will take
until it is finished. Once it is, what will happen to D1? Will anyone
still use it?
I think I might keep using it for a while yet. D2 has some features I
dislike. On the other hand, some others are very tempting...
I ask this because from time to time I like to add new features to
Descent to improve D1 support. Semantic analysis is pretty done for D1,
except for some bugs that are hard to fix, or at least take a lot of
time. :-P
Well, some places I'm still really missing semantic analysis in Descent:
* Nested functions (their bodies don't seem to get analyzed)
* Mixins (functions defined by (string) mixins don't get highlighting,
don't show up in code completion, etc.)
Or are those the "hard to fix"/"take a lot of time" cases? (Or fixed in
trunk but not up on the update site?)
For D2, there's still missing a lot of semantic analysis porting from
DMD, and doing that is kind of boring (adding new features, that's fun).
But if I add features to D1 and it will be gone soon, what's the point?
The features I mentioned above are in D2 as well as in D1, so it's not
necessarily either/or... ;)
Also, I feel that the great majority of the people here don't see an IDE
as a helpful programming tool.
It's certainly very helpful to me. Though Eclipse does tend to use a lot
of memory here, so sometimes I get frustrated and revert to Scite for a
while.
But, in another point of view, I see a lot of big differences between D1
and D2. For instance, I don't like const/invariant, I don't care about
that, I never had bugs or trouble or performance problems because of
mutability problems, so I consider D1 easier to grasp. So I wonder if
anyone else thinks "No matter what will happen, I'll probably just stick
with D1".
At the very least, I'll still be using D1 for several projects I don't
intend to port in any case unless D1 support is dropped entirely. Old
projects need bugfixes too.
What do you think about all this?
See above.
