Patches, bottlenecks, OpenSource

[Don]

bearophile wrote:
> After the last posts about patches, I can write something myself about this topic :-) I am far from being an expert of big software projects, but I think I am now able to understand some things of the D project.
> 
> I like D, it's an alive project, but from what I've seen D so far is not having a so significant success. I think lot of people (especially young programmers) don't want "a better C++", they want no stinking C++ at all.

D also falls down pretty badly in terms of marketing...

> A C++-class language compiler is a big project that requires quite different skill sets: in the D compiler there is work to do on the vector operations, lent/uniqueness, multi-core, 64 bit, work for keep it well updated on Mac/Linux/Win and well packaged, development of Phobos and its data structures, work on the back-end to use the SSE registers and future CPUs or GPUs, tuning of the associative arrays, future improvements of the core language, improvements in the unit test system, large improvement in the D web site and the documentation, big improvements needed for the GC to turn it into something more modern, and so on. Such things have to be refined, debugged, efficient, cared of, polished.

Indeed, D is targetting the most difficult language market.
But, many of the things you've listed are library things. Walter has 
successfully handed over almost all the library stuff. And really, D 
doesn't need many people working on the DMD compiler. We really need a 
lot more library development.
That's where I see the bottleneck.

> So as D develops and grows it will get hard for a single person to write all patches to the language and other parts.
> As D grows this will become a bottleneck, and from what I've seen it already is. 

I think the folding in of compiler patches is far from being a 
bottleneck at present, and I doubt it ever will be. Some of the top 
developers on the Linux kernel are responsible for integrating thousands 
of patches.

Currently, there are 70 open compiler patches. 30 of them come from the 
last 2 weeks. Most of the older patches are incomplete or have some 
other problem; 12 are enhancements. So the situation really isn't too 
bad at all.

 > I suggest to give patching rights to Don, it can be one more step 
forward toward Open Sourcing D development style :-) In future such 
right can be given to other few good people that have shown to deserve 
enough trust.

Many people have commit rights to Phobos and druntime, yet there are 
almost 40 open Phobos/Druntime patches.

OTOH Rainer and I are flooding Walter with patches; eventually he might 
get sick of spending all his time on our patches. Although after years 
of doing all the work alone, it probably hasn't irritated him yet <g>.