Le 10/02/2014 13:04, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad"
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dl...@gmail.com>" a écrit :
On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 09:36:53 UTC, Manu wrote:
I'm confused. A couple of posts ago, you seemed to be annoyed at me for
consistently raising games as a target application space that was
unrealistic, or not 'down to earth', or some fairly niche and irrelevant
target workload.
Sorry about that. I have been following D since 2005, on and off, and
kept waiting for the "better C++" to materialize so I can use it to do
fun stuff with it (audio, 3D, raytracing etc).
One hobby of mine is to read Intel/AMD CPU docs, raytracing papers and
compiler stuff, and discussing those aspects and improving my
understanding of those areas is fun. I am loosing hope in that direction
for D, because I don't think D has anyone with a strong interest in
project management that can drive it in that direction. The responses
from the D leads shows signs, not of a lack of skills, but a lack of
interest in project management "theory" (and unfortunately, that is an
area where I know the theory quite well since I majored in that area).
On the fun side I want what you want. I would love to see you be the
third lead on D, to get a person that "falls to sleep thinking real
time" into that position would make me believe in the project.
On the "pay for bread" side I am looking at D from the perspective of
having an alternative to Go on the server side. I guess that has made me
"janus-faced" in this discussion. What would make me tilt in favour of
Go instead of D, is that it has corporate backing and therefore give
priority to production level stability. Even though I like the semantics
of D better. Stability is important to me since I personally pay the
price (literally) for technical flaws since I offer fixed priced solutions.
Instead of A.A. and W.B. going defensive (and yes it is painful to see
your child get a needle in the foot at the doctor to get that vaccine
that will keep the child healthy in the long term) they should try to
get someone into the team of leads that has an interest in software
development process and software process improvement. Or at the very
least, one person with real time focus.
(Please note that I found it quite amusing that you claimed that I was
ignorant of long running games, since I studied Anarchy Online from
inception to end in a qualitative manner while trying to figure out the
design properties of the design domain, from a system development
perspective. You don't have to convince me, I do understand where you
are coming from and enjoy reading about your perspective. ;^)
Video games is a bigger industry than the movie industry. Casual/phones
have captured a large slice in recent years, but the rest of the pie is
almost entirely games consoles, which I don't think is a diminishing
industry so much as the casual/phone space is rather growing the pie in
overall volume. The industry is expanding as a whole.
Yes, unfortunately the revenue in the mobile app space is very low for
the majority of developers which requires tools that make them very
productive at the cost of technical quality. So lots of stuff is being
done with cheap (and not really performant) tech to cut down on dev time.
Yes I can't tell you how hard it is. Plus editors that are much more
concern historically by market than product quality, cause "mobile apps"
are seen as cheap software. So few people take it seriously, maybe only
Apple understand friendly applications have to be perfectly polished to
be a commercial success.
A more performant and productive language could certainly make a
difference, but to get there you need to focus on that niche, otherwise
it will take too many years to catch up with the alternatives (with
their eco system). And the landscape keeps changing very quickly.
Companies that offer 3rd party solutions fold all the time. So mobile
devs are "jaded".
I don't think anyone in the D community really has that power. If Walter
were to dictate direction that was unpopular enough, the developer base
would promptly dissolve.
Yes, some would leave, but others would join. Those who today look at D
and say:
- "This is kind of cool, but not quite there yet"
- "when can I expect to see it land in the area where it makes me
productive"
- "is this cart worth pushing, can we actually make a significant
improvement here or do I have to push this cart all by myself"
I would imagine that there are more people sitting on the fence than not.
What made Linux work out was that they were aiming for a well defined
vision, Unix. Progress was easy to measure.
What made Linux fail on the desktop that they did not have a well
defined vision, so the community spread out on N alternatives and
progress was hard to measure.
This is a bit simplistic, but Open Source projects that does not have a
strongly projected vision tends to wither and dissolve over time.
the goal. Contributing to D is, in some way, a form of recreation for
contributors.
But you still need a clear vision and well defined goals, because for
every "fun" bit there is 2 "unfun" bits. For every "excellent feature",
you have to axe "2 nice to haves". (kind of)
Are you saying I don't complain enough? :) (at least, last year before
I left)
I would never want to assert authority on the language direction on
behalf
of a single company, like you say, it's a niche target, although a
very big
niche which I think will really benefit from D.
Actually, I think you have the passion to put forth a vision that could
bring D to real time and thus make it a project that is making "fun"
possible.
With no "real time" person on the team I probably will take the "hobby
focus" and enjoy discussing technological possibilites (such as the
discussion we had about ref counting recently).
If that makes A.A. upset. Great. He should be. I am implying that D
needs leadership. He should take leadership. If he does not want to
listen. Well, in that case I am not forcing him to read what I write.
But pointing to github is pointing in the wrong direction. Github tracks
missing bolts and nuts, not a skewed skeleton.
I just make sure that people never forget that the niche exists, what the
requirements are, and that tends to result in those targets being
factored
into conversations and designs.
I am perfectly cool with that. If AAA games is the vision. Good. My
prime gripe is the lack of a clearly stated vision. I could go with any
"system level" vision that is not covered by C++/C#.
Me too, and a lot of people in multimedia/game industry that follow D
from far. I know few person interested that put their eyes back to C++
immediately cause of GC (it's maybe too soon).
That's a shame, I see that as one of it's greatest (yet unrealised)
potentials. What are some other reasons anyone would reach for a
native language these days?
Scalable, low resource, servers. Servers that boot up real fast and
handle many connections.
I am currently musing at OSv. It is a kernel written in C++ that can run
on top of KVM. Having something like Go or D on that platform could be
interesting.
Backing caches/databases/web services for low revenue mobile apps.
If it's not an operating system, or some enterprising web service... what
else commands native hardware access and performance than embedded
development in a *highly* aggressive and competitive industry?
Again, I don't disagree. *smooch*
;)
