On Thursday, 6 February 2014 at 12:43:19 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Thursday, 6 February 2014 at 12:12:31 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
D will never be taken serious by its target audience if no
proper support is available.
What is the target audience? Is it clearly defined?
In the enterprise world I work on, very few projects have 100%
source code available.
In my view discouraging libraries as binary blobs is a net
positive, if that means you loose a specific audience I still
think it is a win. Because I don't think binary blobs are
positive for the eco system. I am quite certain that the
plethora of libraries that you find for Python, Ruby and Perl
exist due to the encouragement of source distribution and ease
of library modification. (e.g. you cannot use the library
without source access).
Binary blobs in C are less problematic (but still problematic)
because of the language stability and compiler maturity.
Binary blobs that are DMD2 means you cannot move to DMD3 or
recompile it to fix a compiler induced bug among other things.
Maybe some commercial players will make DMD2 blobs available
and then pull out due to lack of profit, that's not unlikely,
and it sucks more than not having the libraries in the first
place.
You would be amazed how many times I have written FFI code that
decrypts source code on load.
--
Paulo
