Andrei Alexandrescu





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Hello everyone, This is the end of the year, a good time to look both back and forward. Walter and I have had a long discussion about our strategy going forth. But before that, let's take a quick look at this year. By all accounts, 2011 has been a terrific year for D. There has been unprecedented growth in the community; the disreputation of a fragmented, balkanized community is finally becoming a matter of the past; the community flame wars that were the norm in the past have given way to constructive dialog; there's more interest and more talk about D in public and private events; TDPL has been selling steadily; D's brand and major position on the programming languages landscape have become recognizable to many programmers; and most importantly, the community contribution to the compiler and standard library design and implementation has blown off the most optimistic expectations. Going forward, we want to focus on D's core strengths: expressiveness, modeling power, and efficiency. We believe D is a very compelling programming language of this era, and we want to substantiate that belief with equally compelling libraries and applications. In order to increase focus and unity in the language, we are discontinuing support for D1 on December 31, 2012. That's more than one year away, which gives enough time to D1 users to migrate libraries and applications to D2. Phasing D1 away will not only clarify our vision, but also free up considerable time to concentrate on D's two largest issues: (1) quality of compiler implementation and (2) breadth of the standard library. These two matters prevent users from fully tapping into all of D's core assets. They affect expressiveness because code that's supposed to work doesn't or necessitates ugly workarounds; they affect modeling power because bugs prevent full creative uses of the language, and lacuna in the standard library limit the "bricks" to use when building; and they affect efficiency because, evidently, a quality compiler and a good standard library are essential ingredients in writing efficient code. Best wishes for the next year and hopefully many years to come to an awesome community. Let's continue working together to reach D's ambitious potential. Thanks, Andrei