On Monday, 25 August 2014 at 11:20:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
I sometimes have the feeling that because the D community
discusses every tiny feature or change elaborately (and rightly
so), people coming from the outside have the impression that
it's a half-baked (and thus unreliable) thing.
How is it not half-baked when DMD is released with regressions?
D lacks proper quality assurance and a clear distinction by
experimental releases/features and production quality.
Features should have at least 6-12 months of testing before being
used in production, IMO.
Other languages often just "cover up" the discussions, or in
the case of Go, decisions are presented post factum (with a lot
of hype and "Hurra!" around them), which gives the impression
of a clean and tight (and thus reliable) project.
Go has reached feature stability and does not push experimental
features into the production compiler. The libraries are limited
in scope and thus of reasonable quality AFAIK.
Note that on Google App Engine the Go runtime is still listed as
experimental. Only Java 7 and Python 2.7 are labeled as ready for
production.
The problem is that D will stay at 95% done forever without
proper management.
A common thumb-of-rule is that 90% remains to be done when 90% of
the code is written. I.e. the final polish, refactoring and
maintenance is the most work. Don't underestimate the importance
of the last 5%.
Go is lack-lustre, but it is more mature than D.
So people from the outside have the impression that it's a bit
of a mess and they are ignorant as regards features and
improvements.
The process is a mess if you don't do feature freeze on one
version that is mature and keep it in maintenance mode (only
receiving safety bug fixes and focusing on stability).
