On Friday, March 02, 2012 01:09:37 Brad Roberts wrote: > On 3/2/2012 12:25 AM, Manu wrote: > > But we knew that already, because most of the D devs are linux guys, and D > > does not present a good experience to Windows users. I can personally > > point to numerous friends/colleagues who tried out D and turned away > > within a few hours because the Windows experience was so weak. > > Windows support should be prioritized BECAUSE Windows numbers are low, not > > because there's perceived to be no demand on that platform. > > I'm fairly your assertion is incorrect, if by "d devs" you mean the guys > that are building dmd/druntime/phobos. I think we actually have more > contributors that are windows based than linux based. At a minimum the > numbers are well balanced, not wildly lopsided towards linux. > > No one has ever claimed that there's no demand for windows support. What's > been asserted is that it's easier to support linux/bsd/osx. And indeed > that was backed up by how much time was spent on the platform specific > parts vs the generic parts while implementing 64 bit support. Windows will > get 64 bit support at some point. That's not even a question. What is a > question is when, and there isn't a good answer for that right now. > > There's a clear need to focus/prioritize limited resources. It's not a hard > choice to decide to defer spending many months working on win64 and other > platform specific support issues when there's still language level issues > that cross every platform. That said, as always, if someone wants to > scratch that itch and contribute to improving the windows specific parts, > help will be welcomed with open arms and lots of encouragement.
It's definitely a mixture. Don and Walter are primarily Windows users, I believe. I think that Kenji is as well. I believe that both Andrei and Sean are primarily Mac users. I'm a Linux user. I believe that several others are Linux users as well, but I don't remember exactly who uses what platform, and many of us use several. The current state of Windows support has _nothing_ to do with how many Windows developers we have. It has everything to do with how hard it is to further develop the Windows support - _especially_ when most (all?) of the Windows support issues are on the backend. - Jonathan M Davis
