February 06, 2016
Welcome to the 11th sprint planning.

## Retro

# release 2.070.0

This was a pretty nice and small release, which comes w/ a few features
and even fewer surprises.
There were only a few  issues during the beta, though it took some time
to get positive feedback.
Unfortunately there was little to no dev activity, helping to fix
regressions. So I ended up fixing most which is the main reason for the
2 week delay.

It seems that releases still don't get the necessary attention and we
keep using the github workflow in a suboptimal way [¹].
Many features are still implemented step-wise on master, making
branching a release risky. We cannot scale this approach to more
contributors b/c it's impossible to keep track of the feature states.

Please finish features on your own branch and only merge PRs when they are complete. You can open a PR with [WIP] in the title when you want to do incremental reviews and testing. The size alone is not an argument to split a feature PR into multiple PRs, all of the parts have to be reviewed anyhow, but additionally reviewers need to keep track of all your PRs, and reviewing small changes in isolation is more difficult.

Also you're much more likely to get stuck, b/c one of the PRs isn't reviewed. So please help to avoid the overhead and make single but complete feature PRs.

[¹]: https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/index.html

# nightlies and install script

We've integrated nightly builds and the install scipt with the download
page.
http://dlang.org/download.html
You can also find a dedicated nightlies page here.
http://nightlies.dlang.org/

# GC spinlock (5% faster GC)

finally passing the test suite, still waiting for review

# slist reset (10-15% faster compilation of static libs)

PR finished now, also waiting for review


## Planning

# import and module fixes

It's time to finally fix import and module system bugs.
Those constantly cause code breakages, b/c rearranging imports and
symbols has unpredictable consequences.
We already have a nice PR by Kenji addressing 313 and 314, but it has a
few drawbacks that needs to be fixed.
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/3407#issuecomment-174355761
I'll start working on this by trying to fix 313.

# smaller fixes (leftover from past few weeks)

- fix linker argument order (needs some bigger change in argument
processing)
https://trello.com/c/OoL4WFLq/147-issue-15574-wrong-order-of-linker-arguments-breaks-with-as-needed

- ignore GC.free during finalization (trivial to fix once the spinlock
is merged)
https://trello.com/c/1UXjGQBf/135-issue-15353-std-experimental-allocator-cannot-free-memory-in-its-destructor-if-the-gc-is-an-ancestor

# rcstring

There are plans to implement a ref-counted string in order to approach the RC problem. Detailed implementation discussions are ongoing [[rcstring] Defining rcstring - D Programming Language Discussion Forum](http://forum.dlang.org/post/56B1224A.7050309@erdani.com).

-Martin