dmd & gdc

[xancorreu]

Al 26/01/12 18:43, En/na H. S. Teoh ha escrit:
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 06:06:38PM +0100, xancorreu wrote:
> [...]
>> I note that gdc is completely free software but dmd runtime is not.
> You mean free as in freedom, not as in price.

Yes, both
>
>> An alternative is ldc, also free.
> I looked up ldc recently, and it seems that it hasn't been updated for
> years. Seems that gdc is the only other D compiler that's still actively
> maintained. And from what I hear, its front end is essentially the same
> as dmd.

I think ldc is actively and it supports D 2.0 (see 
http://www.dsource.org/projects/ldc/wiki/BuildInstructionsPhobosDruntimeTrunk)
>
> [...]
>> A painful is the lack of documentation: there is only API/Classes
>> docs and few html pages. The books are non-free and there are not
>> worth tutorials.
> Andrei's book is worth the buy. It's not that expensive and it covers a
> lot of very useful stuff.
>
> As for docs and tutorials, why not contribute by writing more of them?
>
>
>> I like D but definitively it makes me back!.
>> Compare for example golang and D. Both relatively new languages (D is
>> elder) and you have many more docs about golang than D. You have not a
>> bunch of docs, docs you get with python or perl, but it's worthy
>> amount.
> [...]
>
> It's because of the size of the community. The D community is relatively
> small, but because google has such a wide exposure, golang has acquired
> a large following in spite of its young age. Larger community == more
> people writing tutorials, docs, howtos, etc..
>
> So how to combat this? Write your own tutorials and docs. Contribute to
> the community.
>
>
> T
>

The developers, the experts, they "should" write good tutorials and 
bring to the community freely (as in beer and as in freedom). Because 
with lack of ground documentation, the hypotetic learners like me will 
not learn or at least the effort to do it will be exagerated. The 
documentation I could write, the learner, is more more more painful than 
an expert could do.

Perhaps the documentation is the key that developers forget.

How many books we have of D 2.0? One.
All the documentation with API/Class exception points to this. Even web 
page (the two only freely avaliable chapters).

Think about that. Good intentions. :-)

Xan.