I don’t want to be that guy again, but v2.110 was supposed to be released Feb. 1, so is it Ian not being available still?

I don't want to push on Ian but at what point does this start to become an existential issue? Like at what point do you say "okay we're not getting a release page this time but we're tagging it anyway?" It's been the better part of a year. The project already doesn't have too many contributors, and at some point the question will be raised "well, we've been writing bugfixes, so are we going to see them in a release soon?"

My recommendation would be to commit to a date. I mean, aside from February 1st, idk, some time in March, first of April at the latest. If the tooling isn't there at that point, put a release up manually, say "this script doesn't work right now" in the changelog. The project isn't viable if it can't release.

On Monday, 3 March 2025 at 09:22:25 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:

I did some analysis: https://i.imgur.com/13CSAlk.png

From the markings, you can pretty clearly see my theory, but you can also see that I don't know what I'm talking about and there doesn't actually seem to be any clear correlation between release and post activity. And I suspect this data is dominated by contentious megathreads - though, no release, nothing to talk about seems to hold, though with some delay.

On Monday, 3 March 2025 at 10:18:13 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:

I know that I'm in a minority, but personally I find it is a bad indicator.
From my perspective - too much attention on compiler itself and other internal stuff, rather than things done with the language as a tool.

There are so many things that can be discussed:

• tooling implemented for D
• games and game engines developed in D
• business and web applications developed with D
• new libraries and algorithms
• etc etc

See how many things don't care at all about new releases? but those discussions are quite rare..
And this is what should be improved in my opinion, not new fancy features or how bad cast(ref T)

On Monday, 3 March 2025 at 09:22:25 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:

Totally agree. For some reason it's no problem for ldc2 to make a release tied to the unreleased dmd 2.110. Nothing will change for me, I love D, a lot of my projects are tied to it, but in general such delays are scary and can have a bad effect on the community.

On Monday, 3 March 2025 at 09:22:25 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:

Honestly, I barely noticed. 109 has been a solid release and I used it until the last BeerConf when I needed the nightlies to get an ImportC fix I had requested the day before.

Which, in my opinion, is exactly what you should be doing if you need a bug-fix. If you need a bug-fix that quickly than even the monthly cadence is too long to wait, so you would be best served by using a nightly. This also shortens the loop on any further fixes you might need and you'll catch regressions long before they make it into the next release, and then you have to wait for the release after that to get them fixed, so you could easily end up burning two months waiting.

If you need the bleeding edge, you need the nightlies, a fast-rolling release cadence is a poor substitute.

Nobody says this about other languages despite them being on much longer release timelines. C++ is three years. Rust editions are three years. C# is yearly. Java is twice yearly.

In the grand scheme of things a yearly release cadence is actually pretty quick.

Now that I think about it, we follow the SemVer formatting, but we don't actually follow SemVer. That might be something worth looking into.

On Tuesday, 4 March 2025 at 23:08:37 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:

Nobody would be worried if we were switching to a yearly release cadence on purpose. What worries people is that we've set targets for the release of 2.110.0 and missed them, repeatedly, without intending to.

If a project repeatedly fails to achieve the goals it sets for itself, that does not generally bode well for the project's future.