On Tuesday, 2 November 2021 at 17:27:25 UTC, Dr Machine Code wrote:

The reason d in unpopular is because the forums are not active enough, has there even been a thread with 1k comments?

On Tuesday, 14 June 2022 at 19:22:34 UTC, mee6 wrote:

In the early days of D, new features could get into the language by persuading Walter here in the forums. The community was tiny, and such discussions were easy to follow. That's why we have templates, the is operator (i.e., c is null), mixin templates, and more. As time went by and the language became more complex, Walter had to raise the bar on letting new features in out of necessity (my private nickname for him back then was "Dr. No").

Moreover, at some point the community became too large for focused feature discussions. They were scattered across threads, rambling off topic, and difficult to follow (like this whole private-to-the-module discussion going on now).

The DIP was an initiative started 100% by the community. The Rationale of DIP 1 shows why:

This forum discussion is where it came together:

https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/new_DIP1_DIP_Template_92908.html

Do a search on the following page for DIP and you'll see there were 6 DIPs "submitted" within a month of that post (and two more over the next three months):

https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index2009.html

This was all community driven. There was no buy-in from Walter at that point. There's even one post there from someone asking for Walter to declare DIPs "official".

There are plenty of DIP discussions in the archives, but it was never a formal process. Of course, there was some frustration because of that. So eventually, one volunteer stepped up and formalized the process with Walter and Andrei's blessing:

https://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/Announcing_new_DIP_handling_process_44502.html

There are two main goals for going this way:

1) Ensure communication between language authors and DIP authors,
establish better sense of actually contributing as opposed to simply
throwing ideas into the black box.

2) Improve overall quality of DIP documents to the point where language
authors can reasonably review them without spending too much time on
trivialities.

Additional benefit I am hoping for is to have a centralized place to
subscribe to learn about all coming major changes coming to language for
those who can't keep up with NG regularly.
Walter and Atila are the maintainers. If you want a new feature, provide an argument that convinces them of its benefits vs. its costs via the DIP process. That's the bar.

And he added this note:

I will act as a DIP manager for the time being. Please note that role of
DIP manager does not imply any decision power regarding DIP approval, it
remains an exclusive domain of language authors.

I quote that for the last bit: "it remains the exclusive domain of the language authors."

The DIP process was created by the community as a way to refine ideas for new features and ultimately present them to the language authors for consideration. If you want to add a new language feature, then this is the mechanism to do it, and Walter and Atila are the two who you need to convince.

On Wednesday, 15 June 2022 at 04:28:25 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

Walter and Atila are the maintainers. If you want a new feature, provide an argument that convinces them of its benefits vs. its costs via the DIP process. That's the bar.

This bit was supposed to have been outside of the block. That's my text.

This thread has gone off the rails more than once. At this point, I don't see that it's serving any purpose. I don't have a means to actually lock it other than to declare:

THIS THREAD IS CLOSED

Any further posts here will be deleted. If you'd like to raise a new point, or continue a discussion on a specific topic raised here, please do so in a new thread focused on that topic.

Thank you.