Sean Kelly wrote:
Will that project manager care? Most build teams don't update compiler versions very often--once a version has been settled upon that's pretty much it, unless a show-stopping bug appears during development that for some reason can't be worked around. In fact, I can't even see a team bothering to speculate about the future popularity of a language when choosing it for a project. The only thing that matters is whether it's a good decision today, not five years from now. If that weren't the case, then there would have never been a call for COBOL programmers during the Y2K transition.
Back in the 80's, the company I worked for did a project in a particular dialect of pascal. The company making that dialect went bust, and the company was left holding the bag with mission critical app. The compiler was binary only, had bugs, required old hardware to run on, etc.
The dmd compiler source being available goes a very long way to alleviating such problems.
Also, any significant dev project needs to archive the compiler used to build it along with the project. Regardless of the language. That just only makes sense.
