On 10/5/11 6:53 AM, Regan Heath wrote:
On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:39:42 +0100, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
Did it ever prevent you from getting anything done with it?
That's not the question we should be asking. The question we should be
asking is, will anyone ever want to re-use getopts parser for something
other than a once off command line parse for a command line application.
I don't think yours is the right question either. This thread has become
illustrative of a trend that would be great to change course a bit. I
sustained my position in this thread longer than necessary in an attempt
to explain this to me and others.
Let me give a little context. This summer there was serious talk about
using D at Facebook for a project that would last three months in
development. D fulfilled all requirements, but had problems with library
availability. For example, I was asked about D's connectivity to OpenSSL
and MySQL. I told them they can translate the appropriate C headers
manually or semi-automatically. They looked into it but they gave up
because they saw this effort as a foreshadow of several other missing
libraries. The barrier of entry for using OpenSSL or MySQL in Python is
very low. The project was written in Python.
A friend of mine, startup owner, read TDPL cover to cover and loved it.
Then he did some more research and spent $7000 on a top-of-the-line
machine to run his service-based application, written in Python. This is
because he figured he has a lot of libraries already available for
Python that will accelerate his productivity, and estimated that for his
projected load he can compensate the speed difference. "Not everybody is
Google, Facebook, or Yahoo", he said.
There are other similar stories; these are the most recent I remember.
We now have the GNU integration to get busy with, and we need a host of
other APIs that connect us to the world. The right question is, can we
afford to discuss packing three globals into one struct in std.getopt at
this time?
Making working code a tad better could go on forever, and might seem
like progress. But it's not - it's asymptotic progress towards a local
optimum, while we're looking at a hill of potential ahead.
I kindly suggest anyone with an interest in D's future to focus on
moving the big rocks. We can worry about the gravel and the sand later.
Thanks,
Andrei
