On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 08:40:32 UTC, SiegeLord wrote:
On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 08:01:02 UTC, Jacob Carlborg
wrote:
I think all this is mostly a project management issue. I don't
think the breaking changes in them self is the biggest problem.
After years of using D1 and D2, I've lowered my expectations
about what can be changed for the better with D as long as the
current captains are at the helm. You can change the language,
but you can't change the person. Yes, ultimately if the project
was managed better the code breaking issue would be mitigated
for free, but that's not happening. Bad management is one of
the invariants of D's history.
Given that invariant, I just want a tiny concession... I want
my code not to break with every new version of DMD. If some
breaking change must be introduced, I want ample warning,
preferrably in the form of a compillation warning or a
deprecation message, so I don't have to scamper to fix my code
in a few weeks/days after each DMD release, but have the
leisure to do it over a release cycle.
A quick aside about D1... it in fact has amazing stability. I
recently compiled Kenta Cho's D games which were written before
D 1.0... I only had to make a few changes here and there for it
to compile with the most recent DMD1. Far less than the amount
of changes I had to make when upgrading from 2.059 to 2.060
with the D2 codebase I maintain (Tango D2 and my personal
projects). With D1 being discontinued, it is clear where the
priorities lie... definitely not on stability of people's code.
I have a different concession. I come here on a regular basis to
see if the issues hampering some long-overdue work that is
important to me (and arguably to the community) have been
resolved. There has been great progress thanks to Kenji Hara, Don
and others but a couple of critical issues still remain (like
this one http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5380). I
don't give a darn whether fixing the language and tools breaks
other people's code. It is *their* code that is wrong and should
be changed. We should not need to clutter ours with the ugliest
of workarounds because people didn't care to think about what
they were doing. If they can't or don't want to do the right
thing, let them stick to the buggy compiler builds that work for
them.
And before people come and say that they have thousands of D2
commercial code that they don't mind breaking every release...
let me suggest that perhaps for every 1 of you, there are 99
others who don't care for such nonsense?
