What could bring me back to upstream?
Radical reform of process. There should never again be work left to rot. There has been a very long history of forks and abandoned contributors in D due to slow responses from Walter, going back at least as far as the Ares library that would later become Tango (and later, druntime).
Walter has taught us that in aviation engineering, yes, you try to have parts that are as reliable as reasonable possible, but you recognize that it is impossible for any one part to be perfect. Instead, the whole design of an airplane is based on the idea of avoid any single point of failure, including avoiding cascading or coincidental failures. You can make a reliable system out of unreliable parts.
For example, a commercial flight will always have two pilots, so if one gets sick or something, the other can still take over. They have separate controls, connected to the machinery by different paths, so if one side breaks, the other will almost certainly be ready to take over without delay. Pilot training has the crew cross-checking each other, so a mistake made by the captain will be caught and corrected by the first officer instead of blindly following orders.
D's current dictatorship model goes contrary to those lessons. Whether benevolent or not, a dictator is still a single point of failure and a bottleneck on the process. We need to correct this to finally allow D to thrive.
A few ideas:
- Certain features could have different people in charge of it. Delegating responsibility would spread the work load and let domain specialists focus on their area of expertise without interference. This should be true for the language as well as for the library. Trust people's judgement when you're not sure about it yourself.
- Overall language direction could be guided in a formal process by all stakeholders, not subject to arbitrary reversion or hold by any one person. All vetoes can be overridden.
- Language leaders must collaborate with contributors at all steps of the process. Even if an adversarial process is warranted in a particular situation, the requirements must be clearly laid out so a reasonable person can reliably estimate their chances of success before sinking a significant amount of time.
I don't expect any of this to ever happen.