On Wednesday, 28 November 2012 at 02:29:12 UTC, bearophile wrote:

SiegeLord:

I think that unless people responsible for these things get their act together and stabilize D2 against these issues, D1 support should be extended until that happens.

It will take some more years to see D2 "stabilized" like that. The decision to discontinue D1 has some disadvantages, but keeping D1 updated uses some work time that could be (better) spent improving D2.

Bye,
bearophile

The problem we have with this situation is that language users will just run away to more stable languages.

If D stabilised on exactly the feature set it offers right now (or even 3 months ago), I wouldn't be interested. The lowest level is brittle, and the high level is still missing a couple of little details (rvalues -> ref is the key one for me).

D's fluidity is actually one of it's biggest selling points as far as I'm concerned. D seems to accept that mistakes can be fixed and improvements can be made, and it should embrace that to an extent, or you end up with C++ long term.

I think the best approach is one that others have suggested, 2 branches, 'stable' which is maintained for 6-12 months, and only receives non-breaking fixes after they've been tested for a while, and 'dev', which users accept may receive breaking changes at any time. Those users will be happy to adapt their code as the language moves forward, as I am.

You choose the branch that applies to your business, and then you have no reason to complain. The current situation where one branch adopting either policy (and seemingly changing which policy it subscribes to from day to day) will alienate the other camp, and is obviously unworkable.

Under a 2 branch system, the stable crew will still have to update from time to time, but they can do it in one lump far less often, and that should cause a lot less trouble for them.

D should have 3 version digits:

D2.6.1, the second digit representing the last 'stable' codepoint.

Many people need upper management agreement for the set of languages they use, if suggesting D might cause them to risk their job, they won't do it.

I feel this personally.