Sean Kelly wrote:
== Quote from Steve Teale ([email protected])'s article
OK so for those who crave stability there is D1.x, but when all the focus
appears to be on D2, what level of confidence is afforded to
D1 users. Can a project Manager cross his heart and say that D1 will still be
alive and well in five years time?
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.
In the Windows world, you get a new compiler every two to three years,
so that's hardly an issue. Similarly with Java.
Open source projects tend to have to support wider ranges of compilers.
I've seen OSS projects where they prioritized issues specific to
gcc-3.4.2 as highly as any other issue, even if the developers typically
used the 4.x branch.
