On Monday, 14 May 2018 at 07:20:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> There have been 6 major releases of dmd over the last year, with ldc trying to keep pace, currently only one release behind. This is a big jump up from the previous release schedule, I see 2 major releases in 2014, 3 in 2015, and 3 in 2016.
>
> There are obviously pros and cons to each pace, and this has been debated internally before, with one of the ldc devs again posting to the Internals mailing list today questioning the current speed.
>
> I thought I'd open it up to the community: now that you've experienced this faster pace, as a user of the D compilers, how do you like it? Would you prefer a slower release schedule, say 3-4 major releases a year?
>
> I thought 6/year was an ambitious schedule when announced and I wonder if it isn't putting too much strain on our few release maintainers, maybe 3-4 releases/year would be a more gradual bump up.

I have nothing against releasing that often as long as there is a LTS version, and that is where the problem lies - we do not have it. So what I do is simply base my production code on particular release, and every few months allocate few days job to try to bring the code up-to-date with latest DMD.

On Monday, 14 May 2018 at 07:20:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:

> I thought I'd open it up to the community: now that you've experienced this faster pace, as a user of the D compilers, how do you like it? Would you prefer a slower release schedule, say 3-4 major releases a year?

I would prefer to have an LTS release at most twice a year.

The first reason is that we get bugs like the installer not working properly. I reported this bug
https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808
This is the sort of bug that enters when you release too frequently, and it's the sort of bug that causes potential users to give up and conclude the project has a quality problem.

The second reason is that the maintainers of libraries have to keep up with every release.

Reporting bugs is less likely if you need to install the latest release to confirm that it's still a bug. It's hard to keep up with language changes if you're a more casual D user like me.

Having LTS releases and making it easy for those wanting the latest and greatest to build the development versions would be my preference.