On Tuesday, 19 October 2021 at 13:53:04 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>On Tuesday, 19 October 2021 at 13:35:16 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
>On 11.10.21 03:08, Paul Backus wrote:
>Perhaps worth asking why Walter, specifically, is required to work on @live in order for it to make progress. Is it just because no one else is willing to step up to the plate, or is he the only person qualified/capable enough?
I think @live is a dead end and any further work on it is probably wasted unless the code is reusable for some other feature. Ownership is a property of values, not of functions operating on those values. In particular, prioritizing ImportC over @live is the right call. ImportC is high-impact and Walter has a lot of relevant expertise.
I this specific case, I agree completely. But there is a broader pattern in D of projects getting "stuck" because a specific individual is unable to continue work on them (e.g., std.experimental.allocator and Andrei), and I think it is worth considering whether we can do anything to make future projects robust against this mode of failure.
The obvious solution is more people who get paid to work on D the language/stdlib/rt-env full-time. Where to get money to pay those individuals? Well there's no obvious solution to that (that I know of).
We can say community, but, like the vision documents, they will be a bust because one can't make volunteers meet deadlines, code in a particular way, or incorporate all feedback language maintainers think should be acted on.