Countdown to Drupal 8!

The RC1 release date was announced at Drupalcon. Baring any showstoppers, it will be Wed 7th Oct.

8.0.0 will follow some time after that. It will be the first or third Wednesday of the month, and there will be 3 weeks notice given. That means the earliest possible date is 4th November. My money is on 2nd December.

After RC1 it should be safe and easy to upgrade between minor versions, so you should be safe to start developing against it. The biggest problem is likely to be lack of contrib support.

Just to piggyback on what ianthomas_uk said, there was a 5-6 week cycle through RCs for Drupal 7. A "Christmas gift" release for 8.0.0 would be awesome.

Start developing helper modules again and yet again and then after all set up release a new Drupal. And then start over again and again.

A major issue here that is not given attention is that D8 is 3x bigger in code and 2x - 3x slower than D7.

Wow, Someone is skeptical ;-)

Regarding performance, you should check out: http://buytaert.net/making-drupal-8-fly

Regarding code size, what you're not paying attention to is how much you can build with Drupal 8 with just core, and no contributed modules. With wysiwyg, responsive themes, views, media management and more baked into core, D8 needs far fewer contrib modules. By the time you add in contrib modules you need just to make a Drupal 7 site a nice, usable admin experience as well as modern, there's no way D8 is 3x as big.

I just did a line count on a new D8 site, and compared to a relatively bare D7 site with all our stock modules. D8 had ~1.4 million lines of code. Our D7 site runs more like 2.2 million lines.

I think beyond the caching wins that Dries cites in his D8 performance blog post, is simply the amount of RAM consumed by a single D7 request. In D7 (and previous), every single enabled module on the site gets loaded for just about every request (other than when the page is cached, which is not an option for logged in users). In D8, only code directly in the execution gets loaded -- which means I think we'll see it run on far more spartan web hosting environments than D7.

And then there's the whole object-oriented discussion, which we think will do away with the "developing helper modules again and yet again" thing -- D8 is looking far easier to customize in tiny, tiny ways without having to do a huge amount of re-tooling.

In short, D8 looks like a huge improvement, with wins in every category, and I can't wait to start using it everywhere.

@John

Thanks very much for taking time to reply to my critique. In fact, D8 provides much functinality in core in contrast to D7. I think I should start building on it and simply start adjusting the mindset :) since sooner or later I will move to it.