On Tuesday, 3 September 2013 at 21:21:51 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
On 3 September 2013 21:30, Ramon <s...@thanks.no> wrote:
Someone wrote sth along the line of "How egotistical! Some want
this and want that. D doesn't get better or more popular by
wanting ever more things".
I'll very soon begin to work on a project. Originally it was
planned to it in Ada. Relevant feature sets are roughly equal
with D offering a little more (like comfortable unittests) and
Ada being well proven.
I *want* to go D. And I would, of course, gladly tell everyone
who doesn't run away fast enough that our application is
developed in D.(The application will quite probably have a
good,
even international visibility but by no means be major or
widely
known. The major (and very well useable, not "crippled") part
of
it will be free, btw.)
In other words: One can contribute also by using (and talking
about) D - not only by defending it teeth and claws or by
writing
code for or around D itself.
Here is my current resumee:
- dmd not debuggable -> not an acceptable solution, no matter
how
fast it compiles.
- gdc possibly still buggy (Disclaimer: Probably it was just
bad
luck that I fell over a bug (not even an important one) and am
a
little wary now - No offense intended. I'm immensely grateful
that with gdc there is an alternative and, even better, GDB
*works* with gdc - hurray!!)
The current development of gdc passes 100% unittests and
testsuite, so
that gives me confidence to say that codegen bugs are very
unlikely to
be found in gdc.
- gdc (2): I have to either use an old version (4.63) or build
it
myself along with gcc, which is a major hurdle
That is an old version. As I dropped gcc-4.6 support in
mainline
development back in April 2012.
- Can I trust the GDC guys, are they professionals? My
impression
so far: Yes. That's important to me because GDC clearly is the
compiler I'd go with.
You can trust me. :o)
- Will they provide at least GDC 4-7 binaries (they did for GDC
4-6 (debian)) - dunno. Would be a very big Plus.
gdc-4.7 was skipped because of lack of time I could dedicate.
This
time around have collaborated with doko (gcc maintainer for
debian/ubuntu) and gdc 4.8 is available in debian unstable. It
is
recent enough using 2.062 front-end.
In summary, my resumee is quite positive (if with quite some
bumps) but *THE* go or break issue is debugging with dmd and
GDC
being reliable. For the former I don't hold my breath, for the
latter I'm quite positively looking ahead.
Find a bug in gdc -> report it. Otherwise saying it is
unreliable
with no basis is pretty useless to me (I use it day in day out
without problems).
Iain, you made my day. Thanks so much!
I'm really, seriously. honestly grateful for what you did/are
doing. In my case you are the one who put the D issue from
"rather not *sigh" to "go ahead" ;)
Now, if you will excuse me, I'll hurry to debian unstable *g
A+ -R
