OT: Adding D Editor Support

[Georg Wrede]

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Mike Parker" <aldacron at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:g34k0q$1uns$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 
>>Chris R. Miller wrote:
>>
>>
>>>If you use D for the browser based stuff, you'll have the great advantage 
>>>of not needing to sink all the extra money into a server with extra RAM 
>>>to support J2EE, which can consume a frightful amount of memory!
>>
>>Actually, when people use the term 'browser-based games' they are usually 
>>referring to Flash, Silverlight, Java Applets, or some sort of custom 
>>browser plugin (i.e. games that run within the browser). I'm thinking 
>>that's what John is referring to. D provides no benefit there.
>>
>>What you are talking about are generally referred to as 'web-based games' 
>>(i.e. games played via HTTP requests and/or browser scripting). And 
>>really, with Java you don't need a J2EE stack for that. A low-overhead app 
>>server like Jetty coupled with Servlets and JSP pages will do nicely. I'd 
>>prefer that to a PHP solution. D would work just as well in that 
>>environment, but my gut tells me there'd be little difference in memory 
>>overhead.
> 
> 
> If there's anything like leaderboards or multiplayer, then that would 
> require a backend, and that backend could be written in D.
> 
> I would *love* for D to be a viable language for the front-end though. I 
> truly despise Flash (including the official IDE), but I'm working on a 
> project right now for which Flash is, unfortunately, the best option. [side 
> rant] And the client (people, not browser) are on shared hosting so it's 
> gotta use PHP for the backend, and I hate that every bit as much. [end side 
> rant]. I truly wish I could just do the whole damn thing in D.
> 
> Which does bring me to one of the few things I *do* think VMs are good for: 
> Embedded webpage applets should be in a sandbox. That's why I would actually 
> like to see D support compiling to the JVM (*in addition* to native code, of 
> course). Because that way I could use D as a replacement for Flash.
> 
> Come to think of it, doesn't the newest version of Flash support using C++ 
> as an alternative to ECMAScript? I thought I heard that somewhere. If it 
> does, maybe that opens the door for Flash-using-D? Anyone know? But then 
> again anything beyond Flash 7 is poorly supported on embedded systems and as 
> I understand it (which is to say: not very well) Adobe's newer "Flash Lite" 
> strategy seems like more work for embedded browser developers than the old 
> Flash SDK. But I'm probably wrong on that. Actually that reminds me, I have 
> no idea how the Java Applet support is on embedded browsers. Might not be 
> great either. Dang.
> 
> And heck, as long as I'm in pipe-dream land, along with "using D for stuff 
> embedded in webpages", some D-to-PHP and D-to-ASP converters would be nice. 
> That'd let me use D for back-end even when I have no control over the 
> server. 'Course, you'd be giving up anything nice about being 
> natively-compiled, but at least I wouldn't have to use 
> ASP/PHP/some-other-dynamically-typed-flavor-of-the-month (all I really mean 
> by that last one is that to a non-fan of such languages like me, it seems 
> like popular dynamically typed languages keep popping up all over the 
> place).
> 
> Sorry for rambling and ranting so far offtopic. 

(More off-topic rambling below.)

The other week I actually bought a new computer (2.4GHz 4-CPU, 4GB, 
etc.) simply because I got an assignment for a client that my current 
computers couldn't handle. (For the record, I've moved to this Century!)

Now, running Linux, I had the performance meter running on one of the 
desktops, and I was reading TV programs in a browser, D documentation on 
another, and E-mail in another. Then there was the desktop where I'd 
gathered all the windows I needed to study and try Lua.

All of a sudden I heard the CPU fan revving up. I wondered what could be 
the reason for it since I hadn't done anything exceptional for half an 
hour. Turns out there's a banner ad on the TV programming page that 
flashes pictures as fast as it can, with no pauses. Until that 
particular commercial got on (because of an automatic background reload 
of the TV programming page) the CPU load was at 0.1 0.01 0.0 0.02. When 
it got started the load went to 0.1 0.3 0.0 0.02.

In other words, one of my four CPUs was loaded to 30% simply because of 
this stupid banner. Since the CPU fan started revving up, I understood 
that the computer was using more power. Later I put a gadeget I have, 
that's a meter of Electric currency consuption, and it showed almost a 
10% increase in power. On a 1-CPU machine the consumption should go up 
much more than that.

Think about it. If such a web site is for TV programming in America, and 
it puts such a banner on its pages, we might have 50 million people 
having this page visible. A 10% increase in electricity consumption 
should mean 200W * +10% * 50M = over one megawatt. That's equal to the 
output of one nuclear power plant.

So, don't believe this. I didn't. But I've done the math several times 
over, and I can't help getting to this answer.

Greenpeace sure ought to go shoot the guy.