Forums suffering Priority Inversion with Livelock

[Neil Vice]

"Daniel" <murpsoft at hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:ft3rca$2se3$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but I'm noticing a livelock 
> priority inversion in the forums.  Everyone's spending months arguing 
> about constness, when there are clear, simple, and higher priority issues 
> to resolve.
>
> 1) The x86-32 platform is obsolete, and D still can't run x86-64, and only 
> supports SSE if you hand code it in assembler.  One step away from being 
> targetted to 16-bit x286.  x86-64 has been out for a 5 years now.
>
> 2) Compiling a program with extern (C) main(){ return 1; } still doesn't 
> let you cut the excess 80kb of fat.  I don't care what's in there, it 
> needs to be included "on use".
>
> I can't use D at work, and don't use it at home, until these issues are 
> resolved.

The thing is that these are features of the compiler and linker not the 
language. My impression is that the DMD back-end is legacy and fairly 
static, though I could well be wrong.

GDC is an obvious solution to this, but requires regular maintenance of the 
"glue" code. I'm honestly not sure what the status of GDC is though the 
sourceforge page hasn't had a news since 22/08/07 and the last front-end 
version refered to is 1.00.

This is a project I wouldn't mind working on myself, though I'm not used to 
open-source collaborative development and feel that the original GDC 
developer should certainly be involved in some way.

On another note, the usability of const is quite important to me and I don't 
think that discussion of ideas for future language features should be 
considered a bad thing. If Walter's direction is to further develop the 
language spec then perhaps it is up to others to take his open-source 
front-end and attach it to an existing back-end to fix these long-standard 
(and probably not trivial) issues.