On Thursday, 13 March 2014 at 00:48:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 3/12/2014 5:18 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
We are opposed to having compiler flags define language
semantics.
Yeah, that's one of those things that always seems like a
reasonable idea, but experience with it isn't happy.
I would imagine that the reasons for this goal are 1) to keep the
compiler and language sane, and 2) insufficient personel to
maintain legacy variants.
I think the answer to #1 is to not introduce such changes lightly
nor frequently.
For #2, since the codebase is now open sourced and, I presume,
your "clients" pay you to perform specific tasks, legacy
compilation features will end up being maintained either by
random people who fix it themselves, or a client who based his
code on an older version pays you to go into the legacy
branch/build target code. This is the way most open sourced
software works. Linux, GCC, emacs, etc. are all constantly moving
targets that only through people paying Red Hat and others like
them to make the insanity go away are able to work together as a
single whole.
