What's a commercial user to do??? (was: Re: DMD 1.001 release)

[renoX]

Chris Miller Wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:01:55 -0500, Georg Wrede <georg at nospam.org> wrote:
> 
> > Oskar Linde wrote:
> >> Walter Bright wrote:
> >>
> >>> New pointer-aware GC.
> >>  Unfortunately, the new GC results in segfaults for me.
> >
> > If one of the motives for a 1.0 release was to remove obstacles for  
> > using D in for-profit programming, the above quote blows it away.
> >
> > What the Real User (as opposed to us, groupies, DIYs or academics)  
> > needs, is a surefire way to recognize which release to use for his  
> > paying customers!
> >
> > This could be as simple as dividing the Change Log page into Stable and  
> > Unstable releases. And/or deciding on a numbering scheme. Or something.
> 
> Agreed! Perhaps the "D 1.0" should be a fork that only includes fixes.

But the modification of the GC is a fix: after all in the old GC, there are some programs which can slow down a lot the GC which I consider to be a design bug/limitation.

IMHO the default GC should be a good 'all around' GC, not necessarily the highest performance but it should not have easy to trigger pathological cases or too long pause duration which would make it unsuitable for client application (and this will be quite hard to do for multicore PC).

Of course fixing a GC is a high-risk operation, but cautious users can wait a few weeks before using a new version of the compiler, checking if there is a big regression before updating.

> Also, D and DMD seem to be used interchangeably; there should be a  
> distinction. Not all D implementations have everything DMD has. e.g.  
> "What's New for D 1.0" (changelog)... well that looks like a list for  
> what's new in DMD, not D the language. Not all compilers have these issues  
> and features and follow all the same formats (this type of linker, that  
> particular implementation of a function, OMF object files, etc).

Well DMD is the 'reference implementation' of D, so that's not too surprising that both are used interchangeably..

renoX