Conspiracy Theory #1

[Travis Boucher]

Michael Farnsworth wrote:
> 
> I love it when I hear "people don't care about performance anymore," 
> because in my experience that couldn't be further from the truth.  It 
> sorta reminds me of the "Apple is dying" argument that crops up every so 
> often.  There will probably always be a market for Apple, and there will 
> always be a market for performance.
> 
> Mmm....performance...
> 
> -Mike

Its not that people don't care about performance, companies care more 
about rapid development and short time to market.  They work like 
insurance companies, where if cost of development (ie. coder man hours) 
is less then (cost of runtime time) * (code lifetime), then the fewer 
coder man hours wins.  Its like the cliche that hardware is cheaper the 
coders.  Also, slow sloppy broken code also means revisions and updates 
which in some cases are another avenue of revenue.

Now in the case of movie development, the cost of coding an efficient 
rendering system is cheaper then a large rendering farm and/or the money 
loss if the movie is released at the wrong time.

Focusing purely on performance is niche, as is focusing purely on syntax 
of a language.  What matters to the success of a language is how money 
can be made off of it.

Do you think PHP would have been so successful if it wasn't such an easy 
language which was relatively fast (compared to old CGI scripts), being 
released at a time when the web was really starting to take off?

Right now, from my perspective at least, D has the performance and the 
syntax, its just the deployment that is sloppy.  GDC has a fairly old 
DMD front end, the official DMD may or may not work as expected (I'm 
talking about the compiler/runtime/standard library integration on this 
point).

The battle between compiler/runtime/library is something that I think is 
very much needed (the one part of capitalism I actually agree with), but 
I think it is definitely something that is blocking D from a wider 
acceptance.