July 23, 2006
Walter Bright wrote:

> I think the title says it all.

Has anyone recommended that 0.163 should be labelled RC1?  I think this would be fair- hopefully it would focus attention from language changes to finding major bugs/flaws and the "Shop's closed- let's clean up and ship it" mentality.  It would tell people who are maintaining libraries to bother to update them to 0.163 so they will work with 1.0.

-- 
~John Demme
me@teqdruid.com
http://www.teqdruid.com/
July 23, 2006
Kent Boogaart wrote:
> I've only just joined in the D community and have quite a few suggestions to make (and I believe they are all good ones). Whilst I don't want a 1.0 release to be held up by me - as important as I am :) - I would like to understand how future D releases will handle breaking changes. For example, will breaking changes be avoided at all cost a la C++ / Java or will there be leeway so that the language doesn't evolve into a plethora of deprecated APIs and bad practices to avoid (again, a la C++ / Java).

I think there's a reasonable middle ground.
July 23, 2006
Believe me, I understand this.  When I joined the D community a few years ago, I had the same experience.  In fact, one of the first big things I wanted got in! (The package visibility level)

Unfortunately, there are always people joining with ideas.  Frankly, some are not for D.  Most, however, are great ideas but really don't make sense for D 1.0.  We'd all like to see D be perfect, but we can do the idea collection thing forever and still not see anything close to perfection.

Even when I was a D neophyte there were people saying that we have enough and to release 1.0, and since I had some stuff to add I disagreed- now I'm on the other end, I guess.  I've noticed that most of the recent features are much higher level than the stuff being proposed a few years ago (better synchronization/locking, full closures, ect., versus package keywords and DLL support.)  Given this, I feel we are at a good point- feature wise- to say we're at 1.0.  Then we have another 160-some-odd builds until 2.0 to get the higher level stuff, right?!

~John

Kent Boogaart wrote:

> I've only just joined in the D community and have quite a few suggestions to make (and I believe they are all good ones). Whilst I don't want a 1.0 release to be held up by me - as important as I am :) - I would like to understand how future D releases will handle breaking changes. For example, will breaking changes be avoided at all cost a la C++ / Java or will there be leeway so that the language doesn't evolve into a plethora of deprecated APIs and bad practices to avoid (again, a la C++ / Java).
> 
> Kent Boogaart
> 
> 
> "John Demme" <me@teqdruid.com> wrote in message news:e9usak$eag$1@digitaldaemon.com...
>> Gregor Richards wrote:
>>
>>> clayasaurus wrote:
>>>> Dave wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I think the title says it all.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I say it's ready for 1.0.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> vote++
>>>
>>> In my opinion it's unwise to make a point-oh release of anything immediately after major, sweeping changes.  A few months more time for people to submit major language change ideas before closing it up (which I presume 1.0 would imply) would be a good idea.
>>>
>>>   - Gregor Richards
>>
>> A few more month's time for people to recommend changes!?!?  Phfff- we've
>> being doing that for years!   IMO, we've got the features we need for D
>> 1.0.  A few more bug fixes would be nice (#146) but those can be done
>> after
>> 1.0.  More time for the new imports, sure, but no new features!  Let's do
>> this already!
>>
>> --
>> ~John Demme
>> me@teqdruid.com
>> http://www.teqdruid.com/

-- 
~John Demme
me@teqdruid.com
http://www.teqdruid.com/
July 23, 2006
On Sat, 22 Jul 2006 03:30:35 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> I think the title says it all.

I'm not sure, but I think at least what should be done first is to go through all the specifications and documentation carefully and make sure nothing is missing. All the "to be defined"s and fuzzy areas, and such things should be examined and cleared up. During this, some things may be found needing serious attention that are very much better addressed before 1.0.
July 23, 2006
John Demme wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>> I think the title says it all.
> 
> Has anyone recommended that 0.163 should be labelled RC1?  I think this
> would be fair- hopefully it would focus attention from language changes to
> finding major bugs/flaws and the "Shop's closed- let's clean up and ship
> it" mentality.  It would tell people who are maintaining libraries to
> bother to update them to 0.163 so they will work with 1.0.
> 
I like this idea. I also know that other people have said before that a 1.0 release should be quite polished, and that libraries are important. It seems that one of the major reasons for a 1.0 release is to act as one strong push to boost the D awareness. It is important to do this in one push as opposed to incremental releases (ie 1.0 language specs, then 1.0 compiler, and then a 1.0 standard library release) because if people are not satisfied the first time they look at D, they are less likely to look later. As a result, it is better to spend a small time polishing it now, to make a great 1.0 release as opposed to an OK one.

Put simply, a 1.0 release should be a strong hit which persuades people to drop their current language and change to D. As a convert from C#/Java, I think D is better in every way except for _standard_ library support, and for every person who ignores that problem when coming to D, there will be many who don't. I know that there are many libraries around the place, like mango, the GUI libraries and mintl and dtl, so D's problem is not so much a lack of libraries, but rather a lack of *organised* libraries.

If we call 0.163 a release candidate, then, as John said, the library maintainers can update them to work with a future 1.0 release. Then, IMHO, D should stay at a frozen stage while we organize the libraries into one place so that they can rival Java/C#. This needs organization on the part of Walter in order to give an official stamp of approval, but the easier we make D for people, the more likely they are to want to join it.

Cheers,

Reiner
July 23, 2006
Chris Miller wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jul 2006 03:30:35 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound@digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think the title says it all.
> 
> I'm not sure, but I think at least what should be done first is to go through all the specifications and documentation carefully and make sure nothing is missing. All the "to be defined"s and fuzzy areas, and such things should be examined and cleared up. During this, some things may be found needing serious attention that are very much better addressed before 1.0.

vote++

-- 
Kyle Furlong // Physics Undergrad, UCSB

"D is going wherever the D community wants it to go." - Walter Bright
July 23, 2006
Reiner Pope wrote:

> I like this idea. I also know that other people have said before that a 1.0 release should be quite polished, and that libraries are important. 

It seems to me that an official 1.0 release will encourage library writers who might be waiting for D to stablize before investing too much time creating libraries for it. Everyone knows that "1.0" means "first cut." I don't think extensive libraries are necessary at this point. Relative stability of language features, however, would be desirable so that extensive libraries could be created without too much reworking later on.

Peter
July 23, 2006
Walter Bright wrote:
> I think the title says it all.

It didn't take me long to figure out that that's a rhetorical question, but I'm still pondering over why you asked it.

Stewart.

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My e-mail is valid but not my primary mailbox.  Please keep replies on the 'group where everyone may benefit.
July 23, 2006
Peter C. Chapin wrote:

> It seems to me that an official 1.0 release will encourage library writers who might be waiting for D to stablize before investing too much time creating libraries for it. Everyone knows that "1.0" means "first cut." I don't think extensive libraries are necessary at this point. Relative stability of language features, however, would be desirable so that extensive libraries could be created without too much reworking later on.
> 
> Peter

Not trying to be too argumentative here, but I obviously disagree with what you said, otherwise I wouldn't have said it in the first place. The problem is that the more *big* releases you make, the less interest people take in the language, so it's a good idea too catch their interest from the start. I disagree that "1.0" means first cut, because in many OSS projects (which D effectively is), version numbers don't get to 2.0 or beyond. IMHO it really means, "we've got a complete product now, you should have no problems with it." So if someone believes this and then finds that it doesn't come with the built-in libraries they wanted, all of a sudden D is going to use a potential user, because they're not likely to come back and try again later unless they were _extremely_ dedicated.

Cheers,

Reiner
July 23, 2006
Please, another last effort... array initializers.

My 2c...

---
Paolo

Walter Bright wrote:
> I think the title says it all.