On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 19:26:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/24/2018 6:04 AM, Chris wrote:
For about a year I've had the feeling that D is moving too
fast and going nowhere at the same time. D has to slow down
and get stable. D is past the experimental stage. Too many
people use it for real world programming and programmers value
and _need_ both stability and consistency.
Every programmer who says this also demands new (and breaking)
features.
I realize I'm responding to this discussion after a long time,
but this is the first chance I've had to return to this thread...
What you write is correct. There's nothing wrong with wanting
both change and stability, because there are right ways to change
the language and wrong ways to change the language.
If you have a stable compiler release for which you know there
will be no breaking changes for the next two years, you can
distribute your code to someone else and know it will work. It's
not unreasonable to say "Your compiler is three years old, you
need to upgrade it." You will not receive a phone call from
someone that doesn't know anything about D in the middle of your
workday inquiring about why the program no longer compiles.
Having to deal with the possibility that others might have any of
twelve different compiler versions installed just isn't
sustainable.
