On Monday, 16 July 2012 at 05:56:47 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/15/2012 5:36 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Arguably, we've been adding too many new features (e.g. new
lambda syntax and
SIMD support), given that we're supposed to be making
everything that we
already have work properly, but those features haven't been
breaking changes,
and presumably forcing Walter to just fix bugs wouldn't be all
that pleasant
for him.
SIMD support is critical for D's mission as a systems
programming language, and has been important in attracting some
significant adoption of D.
OTOH, if the people who were attracted end up quitting because
the language is continuously unstable, the net effect is
negative, because those who leave the boat won't come back.
I tend to agree that there should be a stable and a dev branch,
with regular merges from dev --> stable when new non breaking
features have been shown to work for a while. For instance,
nothing prevents you to develop COFF and SIMD on the dev branch,
and decide in 6 months to merge those features in the stable
branch, because they've been shown to have stabilized.
In fact, it's much easier to make a roadmap this way than it is
right now, where releases are delayed because new features don't
work.
The 2.060 is late, very late.
