On Sunday, 30 August 2015 at 16:17:49 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Sunday, 30 August 2015 at 06:07:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Morale is important in long term projects that don't pay off
very quickly, and constant nagging and grumbling doesn't tend
to help, even in the case when it is entirely well founded.
Actually, it does help.
There's a big difference between saying "dmd generates code
that's slow by the standards of modern C++ compilers. it's an
impressive accomplishment for a small group, but we ought to do
better. I know C++ and asm, and only have a little time, but I
would like to help. what would be most useful to look at ?"
and something else.
In my experience grumbling without action doesn't tend to lead to
the change you want in the world. In theory maybe it should, and
someone will listen. But human beings are funny creatures.
There has been changes over time. Right now the most sensible
thing to do is
to focus on stability, refactor the codebase, document the
codebase and track regressions. If you actually want others to
contribute you need to leading by example... E.g. you need to
get the boring stuff done first.
Well how would a dictator of D accomplish that? Probably porting
the compiler to D would be a pretty good start, for a variety of
reasons. That will help with stability, refactoring, and
documentation I should have thought. Not everyone knows C++, and
of those who do, not everyone wants to write in it.
By the way, the dmd source code doesn't seem horribly obscure to
read at first glance.
If you actually want others to contribute you need to leading
by example
alors ? as you point out, an asm.js backend would be rather nice
to have, and you are by all accounts a low-level guy, so it
shouldn't be hard to do, no ?
There is absolutely no point in helping out with a project that
add features/optimizations faster than they are finished. Such
projects are never finished. Even if you got 10 more people to
work on it, the outcome would not be that it would be finished,
you would end up getting more features, not more polish.
Given that C compilers are still developing, I doubt D will ever
be finished in my useful career. So what ? The facts speak
against your claim, since D is clearly becoming more polished
with every release - just look at the improvements to the GC
within the past year. (Runtime/compiler, whatever).
For a project that is in perpetual beta leaders need to show
their priorities.
Andrei talked about documentation and presentation a little while
back, and we're now in a much better state. Allocators soon
here. People have got D to run on embedded systems with low
resources. GC is getting better - maybe not yet good enough for
some, but I don't know that it's an easy problem and realistic to
expect things to change in the space of a year. etcimon has
written something interesting - maybe a niche application or not
yet ready for prime time - I haven't had time to see.
Walter talked about the need to get across that D is being used
for serious business by serious people. He made the Andy Smith
talk happen, and that certainly increases the language
credibility amongst a group that spends a lot of money on
technology. Maybe D will have another decent-sized hedge fund
user soon. I tried with a bank, but they had bigger problems.
1. Complete the language specification (define semantics).
2. Implement and polish semantics.
3. Clean up syntax.
4. Tooling.
5. Performance.
As some wit once said, what is true is not original, and what is
original is not necessarily true. Ie syntax/tooling/performance
is already a focus here. Semantics, I don't know. I'd bet on
good taste over excessive formalisation, but I am no computer
science expert. It's good enough for my modest needs. I'd
honestly bet that a little more effort to communicate the
practical commercial benefits of D would make much more of a
difference than this abstract stuff. But who am I to say.
Laeeth.
