Re: D on quora ...
On 10/15/17 22:20, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:24:02 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: database access (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Aerospike) libraries are available, That is important actually. So important that it should be a Priority 0 Must Have. Luckily it should also be quite strightforward to write them. At minimum there would be a C, Go, Java and Python “driver” to look at. Also surprisingly, D has superior driver for MySQL that talks native binary protocol while most other languages use the text mode. The most important SQL DB's all have high quality C libraries. Why not leverage those? I don't understand the obsession with having everything written in native D. To be bluntly honest, I find the VisualD suffers greatly from not being written as a C# MEF component (Visual Studio's plugin system). There is no demonstrable advantage to writing an IDE plugin in D (as opposed to using the native language of the IDE) other than proving that it can be done. Also, I would caution that MSFT is working *very* hard to retire the COM based plugin system for Visual Studio (here is the direction they are heading: https://github.com/dotnet/project-system). Honestly we could probably knock together an integrated D plugin based on Common Project System fairly quickly, but we'd have to do it in C#. Technically you could write a P/Invoke wrapper out to D, but ... why? preferably as a standard library (like in Dart and Go). Can’t do that. And it’s not standard in Go and Dart but packages, dub should work for that. I've been thinking about this question a LOT, and I'm not convinced it's impossible to put the DB libs into the standard Problem is - the development of std has glacial pace. Even if you put say Aerospike in std, I don’t think it’s in our best interest to have stagnated DB libs. DBs add features and ship new versions all the time. What might work is JDBC style approach - having a common interface in std with implementations in 3rd party. SQL might work this way. I've been (slowly) working on exactly this. I started with a concept loosely based on ADO.NET but lately it's more D idiomatic than that. Also, because SQL is what it is (a text based query language) it would actually be possible to include reference implementations of the major DB vendors for the common interface. (MySQL, PgSQL, etc.) NoSQL though is highly irregular and benefits primarily from features unique to a particular vendor. Completely agree. However, some types of NoSQL DB's could be hidden behind generic interfaces, for example key-value stores. -- Adam Wilson IRC: LightBender import quiet.dlang.dev;
Re: D on quora ...
On 10/15/17 13:40, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Saturday, 14 October 2017 at 22:43:33 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: On 10/7/17 14:08, Laeeth Isharc wrote: In a polyglot environment, D's code generation and introspection abilities might be quite valuable if it allows you to write core building blocks once and call them from other languages without too much boilerplate and bloat. One could use SWIG, but... Oh dear, I seem to have accidentally set off a firestorm. Personally, I think there are better places to focus our energy than worrying about what the users of other languages think. We like D, that should be enough for us. The last line was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. There is no way we're going to convert C#/Java users either, and unlike C/C++ we cannot easily inter-operate with them. If we can convert Pascal users, why won't some C# and Java programmers be receptive to D? Plenty of people have approached D from Java: Indeed. I am an example of just such a convert (from C#). :) But it is much more difficult to inter-operate. The easiest path that I can see is Micro-services. Hide your different languages behind a REST API, such that your components are not talking C#<->D anymore, but HTTP<->HTTP. Then the language matters a LOT less, then you can convert individual services to a new language whenever business needs dictate. https://dlang.org/blog/2017/09/06/the-evolution-of-the-accessors-library/ https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/11/on-tilix-and-d-an-interview-with-gerald-nunn/ https://github.com/intellij-dlanguage/intellij-dlanguage/ (Kingsley came from Java). Why can't we easily interop with Java and C#? I didn't find interop with Java so bad for what I was doing (embedding a Java library via the JVM with callbacks to D code), and Andy Smith found similar. http://dconf.org/2015/talks/smith.pdf (towards the end) C# interop for what I am doing sees easy enough. (I will generate C# wrappers for D structs and functions/methods). This work wasn't open-sourced, and nor did Microsoft send out a press release about their use of D in the COM team. But I spoke to the author in Berlin (maybe you did too), and it wasn't so much work to make it useful: http://www.lunesu.com/uploads/ModernCOMProgramminginD.pdf Very cool. I had no idea MSFT was doing that. I didn't talk to him, but I was fighting a bad cold at DConf this year. :( I avoided talking to a lot of people. Even so, I was more commenting on the fact that D has built in support for inter-operating with C/C++. It's not that it's impossible to inter-operate with C#/Java/etc., but it is significantly more work. And that can be a significant barrier to conversion when the ecosystem they are coming from comfortably provides everything they need already. :) Instead of worrying about how to get more people to come from a specific language. People will come if they see an advantage in D so lets try to provide as many advantages as possible. :) Yes - agree with this. -- Adam Wilson IRC: LightBender import quiet.dlang.dev;
Re: My first experience as a D Newbie
On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:27:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: D is much less gratifying than other languages for most people. Just like Windows was more gratifying than Linux for most people in 2000. And I suppose that's likely to change slowly, but continue to be the case for a while so long as people working on Windows don't notice when something isn't working and fix things at root cause. It's usually not that much more difficult to do so than work around it, and it usually pays off even considered selfishly. I can appreciate your frustration, but considering how many years knowing a programming language can pay off for, a few hundred hours spent to learn something new isn't that much. That's like a couple of months full-time and if it works out the payback period should easily be a year. Viewed rationally, that's a pretty good return on investment compared to most other opportunities available. In a world where there are lots of smart people and knowledge is widely available, the barriers to opportunity (there must be barriers, otherwise the opportunity would be competed away) are often emotional ones. So I like things where the difficulty is front-loaded, because they tend to be neglected by modern people who are used to quick gratification. And whilst it surely can be frustrating, the situation is already better both on Windows and as regards documentation and tooling than it was in 2014. It's not difficult to make little changes towards what one would like to see oneself. When you invest this time into a language, you have expectations. A person expects for a language this old, that every puzzle fits together without issue. Call me spoiled if you want but quick gratification it is not. The time wasted on dealing with issue on D, is time you can have spend in a different language actually writing code/testing. Its a barrier to the language its own success when its not as user friendly as the other languages. If a person needs to do a action in Windows and it takes him 5 mouse clicks. But hey, under Linux you can do it with one command line arg, ... the Linux approach sound more easy right? Until you add the time needed to learn the command and assuming there are no issues. What is more rewarding or punishing? There is a reason that Windows is still so popular. Windows does not get in the way. It just keep working. Can it be improved, yes! MS puts a massive amount of time and money in there testing. And it shows in there platform. Its the same reason why Linux as a desktop OS will never work out. Too much puzzle pieces that do not fit, too much assumed that people need ( and have the time ) to learn the complicated way. A lack of inter-testing beyond just the basic compile tests ( i mean really usage ). Its easy to see the same attitude in D as a community project. There are GREAT pieces being written but everybody is working more as a solo developer, with no clear guideline. That is the big difference between a language like D and corporate backed languages. I can easily think of a dozen extensions to D, that need to be part of the standard library or extended library of D, like DCompute, mir-algorithm, ... Why? Because its again lose projects that you as a end consumer need to discover. Most of the time written and maintained by one person. Too much here is so single person focused, that its hard to see people continue the work if that person has no more time. Too much here is single issue focused and it shows in the developers there background, what results in the testing of platforms, the interaction etc. Maybe i explain this badly, but D seems has a lot of issues that people here are not aware off because they are already in the D mindset. And its those issues that show up the most, when one first tries this language.
Re: My first experience as a D Newbie
On 16/10/2017 9:56 AM, Rion wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:27:35 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: D is much less gratifying than other languages for most people. Just like Windows was more gratifying than Linux for most people in 2000. And I suppose that's likely to change slowly, but continue to be the case for a while so long as people working on Windows don't notice when something isn't working and fix things at root cause. It's usually not that much more difficult to do so than work around it, and it usually pays off even considered selfishly. I can appreciate your frustration, but considering how many years knowing a programming language can pay off for, a few hundred hours spent to learn something new isn't that much. That's like a couple of months full-time and if it works out the payback period should easily be a year. Viewed rationally, that's a pretty good return on investment compared to most other opportunities available. In a world where there are lots of smart people and knowledge is widely available, the barriers to opportunity (there must be barriers, otherwise the opportunity would be competed away) are often emotional ones. So I like things where the difficulty is front-loaded, because they tend to be neglected by modern people who are used to quick gratification. And whilst it surely can be frustrating, the situation is already better both on Windows and as regards documentation and tooling than it was in 2014. It's not difficult to make little changes towards what one would like to see oneself. When you invest this time into a language, you have expectations. A person expects for a language this old, that every puzzle fits together without issue. Call me spoiled if you want but quick gratification it is not. The time wasted on dealing with issue on D, is time you can have spend in a different language actually writing code/testing. Its a barrier to the language its own success when its not as user friendly as the other languages. If a person needs to do a action in Windows and it takes him 5 mouse clicks. But hey, under Linux you can do it with one command line arg, ... the Linux approach sound more easy right? Until you add the time needed to learn the command and assuming there are no issues. What is more rewarding or punishing? There is a reason that Windows is still so popular. Windows does not get in the way. It just keep working. Can it be improved, yes! MS puts a massive amount of time and money in there testing. And it shows in there platform. Its the same reason why Linux as a desktop OS will never work out. Too much puzzle pieces that do not fit, too much assumed that people need ( and have the time ) to learn the complicated way. A lack of inter-testing beyond just the basic compile tests ( i mean really usage ). And yet my elderly-ish mother uses Linux Mint and she hates technology. It isn't as clear cut as it may appear, these issues.
Re: Will D continu to live after walter death?
On Thursday, 12 October 2017 at 15:04:57 UTC, moechofe wrote: What is the wanted lifetime of the project? Is D will manage to pass through time? It is valuable to start a 40 years old project using D? Its a serious topic but that gets way too much joking. While D is part of the foundation, that is not the issue. It is leadership, focus, goals, long term vision ... There are not that many people that can take over that task successfullly. I noticed its all a joke to people. Posted in a other topic about the fragmented nature of D and the high focus on solo developers. And the issue of what happens if a main developer of a extension has no more time or god forbids dies. That same applies to D as a language. That D is in a Foundation means nothing. Apple without Jobs is still Apple but you can see the difference in there products after his dead.
Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 00:26:20 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 03:09:21PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote: http://moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/ Some good information there! 1-based array indexing... I don't know, but I've become so accustomed to 0-based indexing that I doubt I'll ever be able to get used to a language with 1-based indexing. Or whether D will ever be able to challenge Fortran in this respect. :P Dijkstra made a good argument for zero-based: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html
Re: Runtime.initialize nothrow?
On 2017-10-15 16:19, Luís Marques wrote: The initialize and terminate methods of core.runtime.Runtime aren't nothrow. Can initialize actually throw? If so, is it safe to catch the Throwable and use it, given that the RT isn't properly initialized? If it doesn't actually throw, shouldn't it be marked nothrow? It can throw. If an exception is thrown during the initialization of the runtime it will be caught (this includes exceptions thrown in module constructors and similar). But when the runtime prints the caught exception it can throw again, because eventually it will call "toString" on the caught exception which can throw. Adding an additional "catch" around the call to "toString" would solve that. The rest of the functions that are called during the initialization of the runtime are just missing the "nothrow" annotation. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Re: Will D continu to live after walter death?
On 12 October 2017 at 17:04, moechofe via Digitalmars-d wrote: > What is the wanted lifetime of the project? > Is D will manage to pass through time? > It is valuable to start a 40 years old project using D? I would be a lot more worried if something happened to me, if I were you. Iain.
Re: D on quora ...
Btw, when I say you can actually develop complete web servers in Dart and Go just with the components provided in the standard libraries, I really mean it, even if I personally also I programmed in Go. I also was part of Dart team for about a year. So yeah, I know what you mean. Ok, then please can you explain why you say about web development libraries that "it’s not standard in Go and Dart", as you are probably the most informed person on that subject from the whole D community. For instance, the web server behind my personal web site is EXCLUSIVELY based on Go's standard library, nothing else was used... And moreover its code is incredibly concise and performant. Great job from Google engineering teams...
Re: D on quora ...
On 2017-10-15 18:29, Ecstatic Coder wrote: Can you just confirm that D's fibers use most of the available processors/cores by default ? It depends entirely what you do with with the fibers. When it comes to vibe.d, it will only run on one core by default, last time I checked. Actually, I looked up the option for enabling multithreading for handling HTTP requests, it's now deprecated [1] and the recommendation is instead: "If possible, instead of threads, the use of separate processes is more robust and often faster" [1] http://vibed.org/api/vibe.http.server/HTTPServerOption.distribute -- /Jacob Carlborg
Re: D on quora ...
On 2017-10-16 07:20, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:24:02 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: database access (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Aerospike) libraries are available, That is important actually. So important that it should be a Priority 0 Must Have. Luckily it should also be quite strightforward to write them. At minimum there would be a C, Go, Java and Python “driver” to look at. There are already drivers for MySQL (mysql-native) and PostgreSQL (ddb). -- /Jacob Carlborg
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:30:03 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote: On 2017-10-15 18:29, Ecstatic Coder wrote: Can you just confirm that D's fibers use most of the available processors/cores by default ? It depends entirely what you do with with the fibers. When it comes to vibe.d, it will only run on one core by default, last time I checked. Actually, I looked up the option for enabling multithreading for handling HTTP requests, it's now deprecated [1] and the recommendation is instead: "If possible, instead of threads, the use of separate processes is more robust and often faster" [1] http://vibed.org/api/vibe.http.server/HTTPServerOption.distribute Nowadays most web servers are multicore, so that's probably not very good to optimize their raw performance.
Re: D on quora ...
On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:42:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 07:21:55 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: But as a C++ developer, I can tell you that : D's GC is what prevents me to use it for my current C++ programming tasks. Because I can perfectly live with a GC that progressively collects bits of memory in a predefined amount of time, like in the Nim language, but not one that can pause my application for an unpredictable amount of time. That's just my personal case and opinion, but I don't think I'm the only C++ programmer on the planet to dislike D's GC for typical C++ development cases, which are generally those where the lack of a GC is the reason that lead to the use of C++. Out of curiosity, what is it that stops you keeping the heap small and allocating memory manually for the rest? In D I've the added complexity in trying to use the game engine (cocos2dx, unreal, cryengine) C++ libraries from D. So that's not worth the effort, if I can't use D's powerful standard library as usual. I don't like the idea that any hidden object allocation or string concatenation can trigger a GC for an undefined amount of time. In C++ you also have plenty of objects constructors/destructors called everywhere in your back, but none of them will ever trigger a GC...
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 02:10:31 UTC, Jerry wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 16:29:22 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: If all that is already available, perfect :) [snip] And moreover I'd be delighted to start using D instead of Go for my next web server developments. You can start now and get performance later? In fact you may supply important benchmarks from your day to day usage. Ok. Still not convinced to use D instead of C++ for my personal use cases (games and other soft real-time apps), but I get the idea. I switched my personal game to D from C++. Was easy, most of it was just copy paste. I was writing a math library to replace the one I was using to make it a bit more light way and to fit my needs a bit more. I didn't like how some thing were implemented in the library I was using. So I started with templates, I need multiple types and what not for the same purpose. At some point I have a function that needs to take 2 different template types. It starts to get so convoluted, order matters cause C++ still just uses copy-paste-includes and I don't think modules made it into C++17. I wrote the same library in half the code, in a way that's more readable and manageable. I didn't have to define things so that they would work, I could define them logically the way I'd expect them to be. Mixins also reduced code quite a bit, generating functions for different types and dimensions. Even though you have constexpr if statements now you still need to define all the function bodies even if they all can go in one function body now. Thanks for sharing your experience !
Re: Will D continu to live after walter death?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:03:56 UTC, Rion wrote: On Thursday, 12 October 2017 at 15:04:57 UTC, moechofe wrote: What is the wanted lifetime of the project? Is D will manage to pass through time? It is valuable to start a 40 years old project using D? Its a serious topic but that gets way too much joking. While D is part of the foundation, that is not the issue. It is leadership, focus, goals, long term vision ... There are not that many people that can take over that task successfullly. I noticed its all a joke to people. Posted in a other topic about the fragmented nature of D and the high focus on solo developers. And the issue of what happens if a main developer of a extension has no more time or god forbids dies. That same applies to D as a language. That D is in a Foundation means nothing. Apple without Jobs is still Apple but you can see the difference in there products after his dead. You're right that it's a valid question for the project, as the main D frontend is largely developed by Walter: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/graphs/contributors Kenji did a lot for 5 years, adding more lines of code than even Walter during that time, but appears to have bowed out since early last year. Walter really should be mentoring dmd contributors, and actively looking for more. Druntime and phobos, on the other hand, seem to be developed by others, and don't depend as much on one person. To answer the original question, it is almost impossible to plan for a 40 year-old project, given how fast tech changes. You have to be prepared to maintain ancient toolchains yourself for such a long time horizon, like I imagine COBOL devs do today. In that case, one of the main criteria should be that the entire toolchain is open-source and fairly understandable, because you will almost certainly have to maintain it yourself. I don't think you can depend on even mainstream languages like C, C++, or Swift being around and having good support in 40 years.
Re: Will D continu to live after walter death?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:09:03 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On 12 October 2017 at 17:04, moechofe via Digitalmars-d wrote: What is the wanted lifetime of the project? Is D will manage to pass through time? It is valuable to start a 40 years old project using D? I would be a lot more worried if something happened to me, if I were you. Iain. A Bridge Too Far... Field Marshal Model's aide: Field Marshal, thousands of paratroops have landed in this area, three kilometres from here. Field Marshal Model: What? Why? There is nothing important here... me! I'm important! They must've landed here just to capture me. [stands from his lunch and moves to the door] Field Marshal Model: Get my car ready. [makes to leave] Field Marshal Model's aide: Yes, sir! [about to leave himself] Field Marshal Model: [pops back in and shouts] And don't forget my cigars!
Re: Will D continu to live after walter death?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:03:56 UTC, Rion wrote: On Thursday, 12 October 2017 at 15:04:57 UTC, moechofe wrote: What is the wanted lifetime of the project? Is D will manage to pass through time? It is valuable to start a 40 years old project using D? Its a serious topic but that gets way too much joking. While D is part of the foundation, that is not the issue. It is leadership, focus, goals, long term vision ... There are not that many people that can take over that task successfullly. I noticed its all a joke to people. Posted in a other topic about the fragmented nature of D and the high focus on solo developers. And the issue of what happens if a main developer of a extension has no more time or god forbids dies. That same applies to D as a language. That D is in a Foundation means nothing. Apple without Jobs is still Apple but you can see the difference in there products after his dead. People can joke about an issue, and still take it as being serious. Consider the poor comedians if that were not the case. And btw. you can't compare Apple(s) with oranges ;-) Also, what happens to all the Windows users, if Microsoft goes out of business? There is no such thing as 'risk free' software development? Being open-source, having a growing (volunteer) community, and encouraging that community to grow further, is the open-source way of managing those risks. And that is *exactly* what the 'Foundation' is focused on. It's all fairly new... be patient and give it time to grow.
Re: My first experience as a D Newbie
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:01:20 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote: And yet my elderly-ish mother uses Linux Mint and she hates technology. It isn't as clear cut as it may appear, these issues. Linux mint is nice.
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 00:25:32 UTC, codephantom wrote: D's overview page says "It doesn't come with an overriding philosophy." Is philosophy not important? I'd like to argue, that the problem of focusing on getting the job done quickly and reliably, does *not* leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code, but rather it leads to unintended outcomes ... If the philosophy of C, is 'the programmer is in charge', what might the philosophy of D be? e.g. Maximum precision in expression, perhaps? It's not very catchy, but I would say "Genercity, productivity and performance all at once".
Re: D on quora ...
From https://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2017H2: 2. @nogc: Use of D without a garbage collector, most likely by using reference counting and related methods Unique/Weak references) for reclamation of resources. This task is made challenging by the safety requirement. Eventually it will come (I hope) :) I'm on the game programming in D train also. And its a bless comparing to C++, but I have the same concerns about the impredictable GC pause time.
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 00:25:32 UTC, codephantom wrote: D's overview page says "It doesn't come with an overriding philosophy." Is philosophy not important? I'd like to argue, that the problem of focusing on getting the job done quickly and reliably, does *not* leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code, but rather it leads to unintended outcomes ... If the philosophy of C, is 'the programmer is in charge', what might the philosophy of D be? e.g. Maximum precision in expression, perhaps? The frontpage says "It combines efficiency, control and modeling power with safety and programmer productivity." The three big words are: Convenience, Power, Efficiency. What are the "philosophies" we are talking about? Probably the usual paradigms, like object-oriented, functional, etc. D supports them, but none of them is overriding or dominant. Maximum safety is another philosophy. D allows you to enhance safety (@safe) or diminish it (inline assembly).
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 00:25:32 UTC, codephantom wrote: D's overview page says "It doesn't come with an overriding philosophy." Then this is exactly, its philosophy Some of the nicer comments I read about D, and one reason why it still stand a chance against other more hyped language such as Rust ... is that D doesn't force any style of programming on you, I understand that some people, like to keep an eye or have a view, of the strategic (long term) advantages of a language , and there is nothing really wrong with that But, D ... isn't missing any long term vision, it has many, and its makers are lacking in the vision department... D just need developers to take advantages of it, on the short term ... to use it now So if I may ... the current philosophy of D enthusiasts should be "write code, not blogs"
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 05:20:16 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:24:02 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: database access (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Aerospike) libraries are available, That is important actually. So important that it should be a Priority 0 Must Have. Luckily it should also be quite strightforward to write them. At minimum there would be a C, Go, Java and Python “driver” to look at. Also surprisingly, D has superior driver for MySQL that talks native binary protocol while most other languages use the text mode. preferably as a standard library (like in Dart and Go). Can’t do that. And it’s not standard in Go and Dart but packages, dub should work for that. I've been thinking about this question a LOT, and I'm not convinced it's impossible to put the DB libs into the standard Problem is - the development of std has glacial pace. Even if you put say Aerospike in std, I don’t think it’s in our best interest to have stagnated DB libs. DBs add features and ship new versions all the time. What might work is JDBC style approach - having a common interface in std with implementations in 3rd party. SQL might work this way. NoSQL though is highly irregular and benefits primarily from features unique to a particular vendor. This is the best answer I've even been given on the main drawback of a standard library component. Then I suggest that some script is used which "standardizes" the module component of a thirdparty library to make it belong to the "std" namespace, and put the result in the DMD/GDC/LDC installation packages. Best of both worlds...
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:58:46 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:42:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 07:21:55 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: [...] Out of curiosity, what is it that stops you keeping the heap small and allocating memory manually for the rest? In D I've the added complexity in trying to use the game engine (cocos2dx, unreal, cryengine) C++ libraries from D. So that's not worth the effort, if I can't use D's powerful standard library as usual. I don't like the idea that any hidden object allocation or string concatenation can trigger a GC for an undefined amount of time. In C++ you also have plenty of objects constructors/destructors called everywhere in your back, but none of them will ever trigger a GC... A std::shared_ptr going out of scope can pause the program for just as long as a GC mark-and-sweep. Have you tried using a @nogc main loop in your programs/games? I'm curious to learn why that might not have worked for you. Atila
Re: Will D continu to live after walter death?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:09:03 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: I would be a lot more worried if something happened to me, if I were you. No kidding. The foundation is irrelevant... it is accumulated knowledge that we'd lose with someone going away. Walter has a lot of it... but so do a lot of other people. Many of us work on the frontend. Backend less so, but even there we'd be ok. But Iain's knowledge and connections with gdc is stuff I have no clue about... and given that he does basically everything alone, I don't think anyone else does either.
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 00:25:32 UTC, codephantom wrote: D's overview page says "It doesn't come with an overriding philosophy." Is philosophy not important? I'd like to argue, that the problem of focusing on getting the job done quickly and reliably, does *not* leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code, but rather it leads to unintended outcomes ... If the philosophy of C, is 'the programmer is in charge', what might the philosophy of D be? e.g. Maximum precision in expression, perhaps? I believe D not having a philosophy was very important when I ported all my projects from python to D. Let me explain. I had a very important project that I've been using everyday for two-three years, written in python, and I grew tired of the negative effects of interpreted languages. I needed to take a risk and perform a complete rewrite to counter the issues. My new language needed to excel in the following categories for the rewrite to be successful: performance, testing, and learning curve. The candidates were Rust, Go, Haskell, Swift, and of course D. Rust had a difficult learning curve and it was not easy to port Python code to Rust, therefore that language was ignored. Haskell stuck to the philosophy of a purely functional language, which made the learning curve dramatic and I had to ignore this language. Swift seemed to be focus more on cocoa apps over command line apps, so I ignored this language as well. This left me with Go and D, both languages that solved my requirements. Let me tell you why I choose D. D gave me the freedom to code the way I wanted to, Go forced me to think "simply". D gave me every feature possible to solve my problem, Go took them away. D allowed me to program in a style that matched the problem at hand, Go forced me to follow only one style. Are you seeing the pattern? When you religiously follow a philosophy, you're limited to only solving problems that play well with that philosophy.
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 13:49:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: A std::shared_ptr going out of scope can pause the program for just as long as a GC mark-and-sweep. I don't use shared_ptr much, but why would a single shared_ptr be that slow?
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 14:14:50 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 13:49:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: A std::shared_ptr going out of scope can pause the program for just as long as a GC mark-and-sweep. I don't use shared_ptr much, but why would a single shared_ptr be that slow? Cascade deletion of nested data structures, with the possibility of causing stack overflow. Nicely presented by Herb Sutter on his CppCon 2016 talk, "Leak-Freedom in C++... By Default.", which presented a GC like implementation for C++, using deferred pointer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfmTagWcqoE
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 13:49:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:58:46 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 20:42:36 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote: On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 07:21:55 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: [...] Out of curiosity, what is it that stops you keeping the heap small and allocating memory manually for the rest? In D I've the added complexity in trying to use the game engine (cocos2dx, unreal, cryengine) C++ libraries from D. So that's not worth the effort, if I can't use D's powerful standard library as usual. I don't like the idea that any hidden object allocation or string concatenation can trigger a GC for an undefined amount of time. In C++ you also have plenty of objects constructors/destructors called everywhere in your back, but none of them will ever trigger a GC... A std::shared_ptr going out of scope can pause the program for just as long as a GC mark-and-sweep. Have you tried using a @nogc main loop in your programs/games? I'm curious to learn why that might not have worked for you. Atila Very honestly, shortly after your remark I've tried to use D in connection with cocos2d-x for a small mobile sports game, and after two days I've given up. I've never managed to find an easy way to make D play well with cocos2d-x. Don't ask me about having it run on android. But I'm not disgusted. I still remain VERY interested in being able to developing all my desktop/mobile gaming developements in D. It's just that it seems that I'm not smart enough to make this D/cocos2d-x/android magic happen by myself. And as I said, I'd prefer to be able to regularly ask D to progressively collect its bits of memory in some limited and predefined amount of time (xxx ms) when and where I've decided to, in the Nim way. For that also I'm clearly not smart enough to do the job by myself, and Dmitry has already explained me twice why he's against that... So at the moment I'm just waiting that some D/GC/Android genius manages to make the impossible possible...
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On 15 Oct. 2017 11:50 pm, "Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d" < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: On 10/15/2017 10:09 PM, Manu wrote: > Haha, incidentally, I've just moved to LA, and I'm failing to convince > myself I won't die if I try and drive here ;) .. I'm still chickening out. > LA? Cool! (Don't watch "To Live and Die in LA") Or just get a used "Yank Tank" and you'll be fine. Hah. That would violate every principle I hold ;) And besides, I'm pretty sure I'm only allowed to have an all-electric in Southern California!
Re: My first experience as a D Newbie
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:01:20 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote: And yet my elderly-ish mother uses Linux Mint and she hates technology. It isn't as clear cut as it may appear, these issues. Off-topic but the issue with Linux is not when you have it stable running ( assuming everything works perfectly out of the box ). Its when you update software. Nothing more fun as lockups when your kernel is updated but you need the update because it allows some other feature to work. We are talking in the mindset of developers, not mothers who only use skype/browser/mail and do not care if the software is out of date. :)
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 15:22:30 UTC, Manu wrote: On 15 Oct. 2017 11:50 pm, "Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d" < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: On 10/15/2017 10:09 PM, Manu wrote: Haha, incidentally, I've just moved to LA, and I'm failing to convince myself I won't die if I try and drive here ;) .. I'm still chickening out. LA? Cool! (Don't watch "To Live and Die in LA") Or just get a used "Yank Tank" and you'll be fine. Hah. That would violate every principle I hold ;) And besides, I'm pretty sure I'm only allowed to have an all-electric in Southern California! You hold principles ?
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 14:24:57 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 14:14:50 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 13:49:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: A std::shared_ptr going out of scope can pause the program for just as long as a GC mark-and-sweep. I don't use shared_ptr much, but why would a single shared_ptr be that slow? Cascade deletion of nested data structures, with the possibility of causing stack overflow. Cascaded deletion? That's far more than a shared_ptr… Nobody does that in real code, unless they are prototyping.
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 16:11:05 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 14:24:57 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 14:14:50 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 13:49:50 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: A std::shared_ptr going out of scope can pause the program for just as long as a GC mark-and-sweep. I don't use shared_ptr much, but why would a single shared_ptr be that slow? Cascade deletion of nested data structures, with the possibility of causing stack overflow. Cascaded deletion? That's far more than a shared_ptr… Nobody does that in real code, unless they are prototyping. You would be amazed what real code on Fortune 500's looks like, specially if it comes from offshored projects.
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:31:51 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: Btw, when I say you can actually develop complete web servers in Dart and Go just with the components provided in the standard libraries, I really mean it, even if I personally also I programmed in Go. I also was part of Dart team for about a year. So yeah, I know what you mean. Ok, then please can you explain why you say about web development libraries that "it’s not standard in Go and Dart", Web development for me is usually a fair bit more then: Register a bunch of handler functions that do Http Request -> Http Response ( Go std lib cira 2015) There is templating, routing, some kind of ORM (sick) / ODM / DAO, access-control, authorization, marshaling, these things. I recognize some of these have simple versions in Go’s std lib like templates and json serialization. My point is not that http server is not bundled but rather that for me “whole http server” would imply some backend work i.e. DB drivers and other 3rd party stuff. Go projects I worked on pulled in a great amount of these. Too much I’d say. There is a package for everything in Go or so it seems. as you are probably the most informed person on that subject from the whole D community. For instance, the web server behind my personal web site is EXCLUSIVELY based on Go's standard library, nothing else was used... I just double checked and yes, you can’t do SQL without database “driver” package. So I’m really curious how you get by without it... Files/REST API? And moreover its code is incredibly concise and performant. Great job from Google engineering teams... They have very nice runtime since around 1.6. Can’t agree on consie part, Go always looks verbose and repetative, a bit like Java 1.2. Dart also features quite capable JIT and runtime, in contrast to Go it’s quite concise but more high-level.
[OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 10:09:04PM -0700, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote: >On 15 Oct. 2017 6:40 pm, "Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d" ><[1]digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: [...] > I don't want to even try 1 based. All my learned behaviors with > arrays would just produce corrupt code. > > It's why I don't dare try driving in England. > >Haha, incidentally, I've just moved to LA, and I'm failing to >convince myself I won't die if I try and drive here ;) .. I'm still >chickening out. [...] I've driven in LA before, even though I don't live there. It's not half as bad as people make it sound. You just have to know the driving culture of the place and act accordingly, that is, be assertive and clear exactly what your intention is, and do not hesitate once you make a decision. Or, in more practical terms, know what you want, and *take* it. LA drivers know how to read the cues -- as long as you follow through with what they think you will do. It's when you waver and send mixed signals that it gets dangerous. They hate it when you look like you're unsure, and it tends to make them angry and more aggressive. Of course, this does not preclude safety considerations; in fact, it means that you have to be absolutely sure what you want (and the safety of what you want) before you even begin, lest you find yourself in a dangerous situation with no safe way out. T -- What do you call optometrist jokes? Vitreous humor.
Re: D on quora ...
On 2017-10-16 09:45, Adam Wilson wrote: The most important SQL DB's all have high quality C libraries. Why not leverage those? If the drivers should be compatible with vibe.d the underlying C library needs to be compatible vibe.d's asynchronous event model. I don't know if they all (the C libraries) support asynchronous communication. -- /Jacob Carlborg
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On 16 October 2017 at 10:56, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 10:09:04PM -0700, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote: > >On 15 Oct. 2017 6:40 pm, "Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d" > ><[1]digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > [...] > > I don't want to even try 1 based. All my learned behaviors with > > arrays would just produce corrupt code. > > > > It's why I don't dare try driving in England. > > > >Haha, incidentally, I've just moved to LA, and I'm failing to > >convince myself I won't die if I try and drive here ;) .. I'm still > >chickening out. > [...] > > I've driven in LA before, even though I don't live there. It's not half > as bad as people make it sound. You just have to know the driving > culture of the place and act accordingly, that is, be assertive and > clear exactly what your intention is, and do not hesitate once you make > a decision. Or, in more practical terms, know what you want, and *take* > it. LA drivers know how to read the cues -- as long as you follow > through with what they think you will do. It's when you waver and send > mixed signals that it gets dangerous. They hate it when you look like > you're unsure, and it tends to make them angry and more aggressive. > > Of course, this does not preclude safety considerations; in fact, it > means that you have to be absolutely sure what you want (and the safety > of what you want) before you even begin, lest you find yourself in a > dangerous situation with no safe way out. > That... and they drive on the wrong side of the road! ;)
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On Monday, October 16, 2017 11:42:56 Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote: > That... and they drive on the wrong side of the road! ;) http://jokes.cc.com/funny-lookin--good/yn3vw9/the-wrong-way - Jonathan M Davis
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 11:42:56AM -0700, Manu wrote: [...] >That... and they drive on the wrong side of the road! ;) [...] Ah! Well, that is a different story, then. :D My hometown also drives on the wrong side of the road (I learnt driving after I left), and I'm also still chickening out, in spite of having driven in LA. :P Well, that, and over there there are no driving laws -- the so-called "laws" are in practice only rarely-heeded recommendations. You find 3 lanes of moving cars on a 2-lane road, and people parallel-park leaving only 2 inches between cars. Nope, not for me. :D I suppose this is like Walter not daring to write code with 1-based arrays. :D On that note, though, in D I only rarely actually need to specify explicit indices. Foreach and generic code alleviates most cases of explicit indexing I'd normally write in C/C++ code, and I wouldn't be surprised if much of my code could actually be ported to 1-based indexing with only minor changes. But I suppose if you're doing matrix/tensor math, you can't really avoid this. T -- Democracy: The triumph of popularity over principle. -- C.Bond
Re: My first experience as a D Newbie
On Friday, 13 October 2017 at 13:14:39 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: I don't know what the expectations of a Windows user are. In my exprience 80% of mainly Windows devs (in professional environment) use Visual Studio + plugins (e.g. Visual Assist/Dpack etc.). Most of the remaining 20% use Visual Studio with vim keybindings/emulation or they code with vim/emacs, but use Visual Studio for debugging. And the last 2% use something completely different. I think Visual Studio is the professional standard for C/C++/C# on Windows (as in Windows is the main platform and not some bad port hacked on top of cygwin). Basically what Xcode is for Mac.
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 17:17:29 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:31:51 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: Btw, when I say you can actually develop complete web servers in Dart and Go just with the components provided in the standard libraries, I really mean it, even if I personally also I programmed in Go. I also was part of Dart team for about a year. So yeah, I know what you mean. Ok, then please can you explain why you say about web development libraries that "it’s not standard in Go and Dart", Web development for me is usually a fair bit more then: Register a bunch of handler functions that do Http Request -> Http Response ( Go std lib cira 2015) There is templating, routing, some kind of ORM (sick) / ODM / DAO, access-control, authorization, marshaling, these things. I recognize some of these have simple versions in Go’s std lib like templates and json serialization. My point is not that http server is not bundled but rather that for me “whole http server” would imply some backend work i.e. DB drivers and other 3rd party stuff. Go projects I worked on pulled in a great amount of these. Too much I’d say. There is a package for everything in Go or so it seems. as you are probably the most informed person on that subject from the whole D community. For instance, the web server behind my personal web site is EXCLUSIVELY based on Go's standard library, nothing else was used... I just double checked and yes, you can’t do SQL without database “driver” package. So I’m really curious how you get by without it... Files/REST API? And moreover its code is incredibly concise and performant. Great job from Google engineering teams... They have very nice runtime since around 1.6. Can’t agree on consie part, Go always looks verbose and repetative, a bit like Java 1.2. Dart also features quite capable JIT and runtime, in contrast to Go it’s quite concise but more high-level. If you had tried my website you would have noticed that it's a static web site, so no SQL was harmed during its production ;) And to be 100% honest with you, indeed I actually don't program in Go but in my own proprietary language which emits Go code from a syntax similar to my Phoenix language, hence the "concise" adjective. (it's here if you are curious about it : https://github.com/senselogic/PHOENIX) Additionally to the Phoenix-like syntax, Helix allows me to use Allman style, macro-based genericity (through multi-token substitution), which is nice, even if several Go fanatics have explained me in a not so kind manner how and why it would silly and useless to do that, as Go is already perfect. (I had the same remarks from PHP coders for Phoenix btw). But I don't care, it's my own personal language, and since one of Go's designed has decided to piss over me twice (guess who), I've decided to keep it for me and let the Go community program the way they want, i.e. by using slow-as-hell interfaces for everything or repeatedly copy-paste-modify the same lines of code... And YES, despite their flaws, I still think that Dart and Go are by far the best web development languages we have right now, especially compared to PHP and JavaScript/Node.js.
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On 10/16/17 2:42 PM, Manu wrote: That... and they drive on the wrong side of the road! ;) We drive on the right side. Both literally and philosophically :) Seriously though, driving in LA is nothing compared to an eastern city where everything was determined by horse-cart paths. I drove a car in England once. The most difficult thing to do was coming back home. There, I was acutely aware of the awkwardness, given that the shifter was on my left and not the right. When I came back, going to make turns, I was second guessing everything! -Steve
Re: [OT] Re: Why Physicists Still Use Fortran
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 18:56:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: I suppose this is like Walter not daring to write code with 1-based arrays. :D On that note, though, in D I only rarely actually need to specify explicit indices. Foreach and generic code alleviates most cases of explicit indexing I'd normally write in C/C++ code, and I wouldn't be surprised if much of my code could actually be ported to 1-based indexing with only minor changes. But I suppose if you're doing matrix/tensor math, you can't really avoid this. I always thought slicing was a more important difference for 0 or 1-based indexing, rather than loops. Consider D's A[m..n] vs. Matlab's A[m:n]. Matlab's is easier to explain to someone with a math background because you get A[m] through A[n, instead of A[m] through A[n-1] in Ds. However, D's A[m..n].length = n - m, whereas Matlab's length(A[m:n])= n - m + 1. Thus, you often find yourself adjusting formulae all over the place to account for the extra "+1". Nevertheless, if you have more of a mathematics background, you always need to remember that if you wanted A[m:n] in Matlab, you need A[(m - 1)..n] to get the equivalent in D.
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 00:25:32 UTC, codephantom wrote: D's overview page says "It doesn't come with an overriding philosophy." Is philosophy not important? I'd like to argue, that the problem of focusing on getting the job done quickly and reliably, does *not* leave behind maintainable, easy to understand code, but rather it leads to unintended outcomes ... If the philosophy of C, is 'the programmer is in charge', what might the philosophy of D be? e.g. Maximum precision in expression, perhaps? "Get it done, but also right"
Re: Proposal: Object/?? Destruction
On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 15:19:21 UTC, Q. Schroll wrote:
On Saturday, 14 October 2017 at 23:20:26 UTC, sarn wrote:
On Saturday, 14 October 2017 at 22:20:46 UTC, Q. Schroll wrote:
Therefore, and because of brackets, you can distinguish f(1,
2) from f([1, 2]).
But in f([1, 2]), it's ambiguous (just by parsing) whether [1,
2] is a tuple literal or a dynamic array literal.
It would be a tuple if that's the best match, otherwise
conversion to int[] is tried.
...
You'd need to use a prefix or something to the bracket syntax.
[snip]
I just argued, you don't!
But have you thought through all the implications?
Take this code:
void main(string[] args)
{
import std.stdio : writeln;
writeln([1, 3.14]);
}
As you're probably 100% aware, this is totally valid D code
today. [1, 3.14] becomes a double[] because 1 gets converted to
a double. If this kind of behaviour changes, code will break, so
you'll need a bunch of exceptions to the "it would be a tuple if
that's the best match" rule. Also, for the same backwards
compatibility reasons, it would be impractical in most cases to
add any tuple overloads to most existing standard library
functions that currently accept slices or arrays, but presumably
new functions would be meant to take advantage of the new syntax
(else there wouldn't be much point creating a new syntax).
So, a literal like [1, 3.14] would basically be a tuple, but
would be converted to double[] in a bunch of special cases for
historical reasons.
If you're not sure if this is really a problem, take a look at
the confusion caused by the magic in {} syntax:
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/ecwfiderxbfqzjcyy...@forum.dlang.org
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/ihsmxiplprxwlqkgw...@forum.dlang.org
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/qsayoktyffczskrnm...@forum.dlang.org
To be totally honest, I still don't see what's wrong with just
creating a new bracket syntax, instead of adding more magic to []
(or () for that matter).
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 13:56:34 UTC, skymuse wrote: ...Let me tell you why I choose D. D gave me the freedom to code the way I wanted to, Go forced me to think "simply". D gave me every feature possible to solve my problem, Go took them away. D allowed me to program in a style that matched the problem at hand, Go forced me to follow only one style. Are you seeing the pattern? When you religiously follow a philosophy, you're limited to only solving problems that play well with that philosophy. Don't confuse religion and philosophy. One is a dynamic const, the other is purely dynamic ;-) I take it from your story, that one could say the philosophy of D, is: 'Do it your way'. That sounds like a great philosophy! And it certainly fits with my understanding of the capabilities of D, and perhaps is indicative of the spirit in which D came about ;-)
Re: What is the Philosophy of D?
codephantom wrote: I take it from your story, that one could say the philosophy of D, is: 'Do it your way'. and "have fun" too. this is important.
Re: D on quora ...
On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 20:02:16 UTC, Ecstatic Coder wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 17:17:29 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote: On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 09:31:51 UTC, Ecstatic Coder If you had tried my website you would have noticed that it's a static web site, so no SQL was harmed during its production ;) And to be 100% honest with you, indeed I actually don't program in Go but in my own proprietary language which emits Go code from a syntax similar to my Phoenix language, hence the "concise" adjective. I actually think that Go is quite an attractive _runtime_ to target. Sooner or later somebody should notice that too. (it's here if you are curious about it : https://github.com/senselogic/PHOENIX) Additionally to the Phoenix-like syntax, Helix allows me to use Allman style, macro-based genericity (through multi-token substitution), which is nice, even if several Go fanatics have explained me in a not so kind manner how and why it would silly and useless to do that, as Go is already perfect. Yeah, the biggest disservice to Go community is a decent amount of blind fanatics. (I had the same remarks from PHP coders for Phoenix btw). But I don't care, it's my own personal language, and since one of Go's designed has decided to piss over me twice (guess who), I've decided to keep it for me and let the Go community program the way they want, i.e. by using slow-as-hell interfaces for everything or repeatedly copy-paste-modify the same lines of code... Yeah, seen a lot of these. And then, of course, crude in-house codegen tools :) And YES, despite their flaws, I still think that Dart and Go are by far the best web development languages we have right now, especially compared to PHP and JavaScript/Node.js.
