On Tuesday, 2 January 2024 at 17:55:56 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:
> Hello everyone!
Growing greatly dissatisfied with how things are in the D Programming Language, we decided it is time to fork it.
We want to change the way decisions are made, giving both more freedom to change, and more speed to decision making. We want the process of contribution to be as open-ended as possible, and not having unnecessary blockage to contributions. We also want the language to allow for faster software development. The way this is going to be achieved is still not finalized, but that is the goal.
I think this is a good way for Adam and co. to blow off some steam and push forward with the changes they would like to see. I wish them all well on that. They should achieve their goal of evolving their preferred flavour of D faster than it would otherwise happen.
Other potential goals such as becoming a popular and well used dialect of D will be much harder to achieve. A lot of people currently put in a lot of effort on the project admin side, such as web sites, source code management, funding, organising conferences, dealing with commercial customers etc. A handful of gearheads will not want to be spending their weekends and evenings doing that.
This time next year Adam will have a new understanding of why things are as they are.
If this "fork" could be under the umbrella of the main D project, as an experimental D, then I think it has more chance of influencing D and getting the changes into the mainline.
Right now in Discord there is talk of changes to ranges, dub, iterators etc. Significant changes in those areas would take months/years and likely isolate "OpenD" and break many of the libraries in existence. It would make the chances of adoption very small and the community would likely remain small and cut off from the main stream.
Just my two cents.