On Sunday, December 02, 2012 12:26:24 Johannes Pfau wrote: > Right now we have can't promise not to break code because > we can't keep and support code like std.xml forever but we also can't > simply remove std.xml because we try to avoid breaking code. So we > deprecate small parts of modules in every release which is a pita for > everyone. Dropping all sub-par code and fixing naming conventions in > one release would get us a clean restart without all that cruft.
I've done a lot in the past to try and fix function names which didn't have the correct naming conventions or were otherwise obviously wrong (e.g. the functions in std.ctype returning int instead of bool as if they were C functions rather than D functions), but there's a limit to what we can do, and we've arguably taken too long to resolve a lot of these issues. There's also increased resistance to breaking code. Walter has _always_ been against it pretty much regardless of the reason, and Andrei is starting to come around to his way of thinking. He's even starting to balk at removing functions which have been deprecated even though you have to compile with -d to use them at all. So, I suspect that it's too late at this point to do anything like what you suggest. What I've already done was requested by a lot of people (e.g. fixing the names of the functions in std.string), but it's also resulted in a lot of complaints - especially from those folks trying to use D professionally. And even when we've gotten away with changing things, it's rarely been the case that we've broken stuff immediately. Rather, we've provided new functionality in new names and put the old ones through the deprecation process. So, I'd expect that std.xml would be replaced with std.xml2 rather than being thrown out and immediately replaced with the new std.xml. And while there was some talk at one point of outright throwing out std.xml even though we don't have a replacement yet, and it never happened. So, while I can sympathize with your position and to some extent agree with it, I think that it's too late. - Jonathan M Davis
