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

[Chris Miller]

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:30:33 -0500, renoX <renosky at free.fr> wrote:

> 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.

Yep, too risky. It's not a fix if it causes more problems. It was untested.

>
>> 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..

I know, and that doesn't invalidate what I said; they're not the same  
thing. It's not JUST a reference; if it is, D sucks, GDC is not a valid D  
implementation, and there's really no way to have another implementation.