On Friday, 4 July 2014 at 12:59:41 UTC, bearophile wrote:
If the D maintainers don't care about reaching a stable state,
at the expense of scope and features,
Don't be silly, D devs care a lot about reaching stability,
fixing bugs, etc.
But not to the extent that they are willing to limit the scope
and features to get there in reasonable time for D2 (say 10
months), so the feature set is expanding and the scope of the
standard library is too big for a stable mature library that is
easy to use to be feasible as far as I can tell. Dart is going
down the same path. It affects adoption, which in turn affects
the eco system. Basically Dart pushed their commercial adoption
two years into the future by not commiting to stable platform
support, claming that they only support "evergreen browsers",
whatever that means. Which pretty much lets Google, Apple and
Microsoft define platform stability.
I'm not trying to be pushy or silly. I just want to know if the
most probable path for an alternative system development language
is a fork or spinning up a new project.
Evolutionary development is great when there is great uncertainty
and you need prototyping, but then you need to focus on getting
to something that is tight, uniform, portable (future proof) and
feasible with the available resources.
A good starting point would be to get down to locking down the
specs in a coherent and platform agnostic manner, then plan for
making a mature toolset to support it. The D spec should be clear
on what IEEE 754 compliance actually means and relate it to all
probable scenarios. That would be a very useful exercise in
decision making.
