On Sunday, 5 October 2025 at 22:41:36 UTC, Clouudy wrote:
I think that a lot of the complaints about no visual progress
being made on tooling or the language in general could be
solved by a roadmap or some way to direct the community towards
making their own contributions towards a specific goal, and
then choosing a new goal after that one's been completed.
Anything that makes the experience more streamlined would help,
tbh.
Sometimes people ask Walter for tasks to work on. After hearing
the tasks he gives, the enthusiasm quickly dies down. For
example, apparently no one wants to write an [80 bit floating
point
emulator](https://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]).
Many attempts have been made to organize priority issues and
motivate new contributors, including:
- Bi-annual [vision
statements](https://wiki.dlang.org/Category:Vision_Statements)
- DMD strike teams on Slack
- Bug bounty program on Flipcause
- Quarterly Bugzilla rewarding cycle
- Ucora's IVY program
- #dbugfix campaign
While they have resulted in positive effects, they weren't very
successful. That doesn't mean the ideas are unsound, they could
have just been executed poorly. But it goes to show: it's not as
simple as just raising the idea "have a vision document" or
"direct the community to work on specific issues". Unless you can
give a specific implementation of those ideas with a track record
of success, I don't expect it to go any differently than previous
attempts unfortunately.
And AFAIK there already were complaints about debugging in DMD,
to the point that they're even on the GitHub for the compiler
IIRC.
It's good that you raise awareness for issues like this, but it's
even better if you include links to the GitHub issues whenever
they come up.
