Since the 1.0 release, there has been much pleading, begging and griping from D users regarding the desire to see stable and unstable branches of DMD. Today, the stars have aligned and the seas have parted. Walter has made known the following:
I’m currently working on implementing const/invariant. It’s becoming
clear that this is a pervasive change, and will cause binary
incompatibility with existing code. I’m trying to minimize any source
incompatibilities.The first few iterations of const support probably will have lots of
problems before it gets usable.This means that dmd will have to fork into a 1.x maintenance version and
a 2.x beta.
There was much rejoicing.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, DMD, Digital Mars, Walter Bright
finally
I always love to watch what W is adding, and I want more and more features… but, for stable projects there is a neceserity of stable D (only with bugfixes).
Yeah, I’m happy he finally decided to go this route. Moving targets are hard to keep up with.
The obvious question is, which fork will Derelict track?
Derelict is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t use any of D’s more esoteric features. So while I will say that, officially, only the 1.x branch will be supported while 2.x is beta, I don’t foresee any problems with 2.x compatibility.