D Language 2.0

[retard]

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:05:14 -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> "Daniel" <dan.from.tokyo at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:hj0pvc$2sil$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>>
> Haven't we already had enough posts about "I don't like D2 because it
> doesn't add *enough* stuff"? Fuck, people, this shit takes time!
> 
>> D still takes 80kb just to print "hello world" to the prompt.
> We *just* had a large debate over whether or not 200k was a problem for
> a "hello world". And now we're getting bellyaching over a measly 80k?
> WTF?

The size matters when max instruction memory size is for example 32 or 64 
kB.. embedded systems are most widely used computers in the world of 
today.

> The in/out/inout are only for function parameters and are not as
> fine-grained as const, so they're no substitute either.

Function contracts are pretty much orthogonal to const. Even with both 
enabled, this doesn't guarantee 100% bug free code. High level errors in 
human reasoning usually cannot be spotted with low level verification 
systems. Both also come with both syntactical and semantical burden. It's 
not always wrong to argue that less features is more. Const doesn't 
always lend itself well to various use cases.

>> D is still aimed at the i486,
> 
> Yea! That's terrible! Let's just deprecate anything less than 64-bit
> quad-core, because anything less than top-of-the-line is useless.
> 
> And I don't want to hear that damn "but that's all that the stores
> sell!" strawman that I've heard a thousand times because everyone knows
> damn well that's not all that's *actually in use*.

Last 486 generations were manufactured 16 years ago. When Walter started 
D, something similar to what i486 represents today was VIC-20 or the 
previous generation machines with about 1..2 kB of RAM. Back in the 1999, 
the last manufactured Commodore 64 was already 13 yo and VIC-20 (with 
3583 bytes available to the user!) 14 yo - and even back in 1999 the 
famous platforms of 80s were considered dead outside demoscene.

Let's be honest, 486 isn't widely used anywhere anymore. Many embedded 
applications have been upgraded to a better platform. Majority of new 
operating systems (including Linux distributions which default to i586, 
i686, or x86-64) won't run on it. It still has its uses in some places, 
but one shouldn't focus on it too much anymore. Those machines had hard 
disks with on avg max 500 MB of unpartitioned space. Best models came 
with about 16 MB of RAM. Most of the 486s had more modest set of features 
(mine had 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, and a 100MB disk - so a typical DWT hello world 
app would consume all of the available RAM) and I think a large part of 
them lacked FPU support. The FPU performance was so bad that lookup 
tables were often faster than the ones performed directly by the FPU. The 
cache behavior differs pretty much from what we have in Pentiums, Core2, 
or Core i7. Why should we care about all that now? The embedded/legacy 
market requires a totally different kind of compiler - possibly without 
RTTI and garbage collector. C, BitC, C--, Forth, Assembler et al fill 
this niche nicely.

> 
>> and is just starting to handle threading.
> 
> It's been no worse at threading than C/C++ for quite some time. It's
> just starting to have a threading model that kicks the crap out of the
> threading in the vast majority of languages out there. But that's a hell
> of a far cry from "just starting to handle threading".

I don't think D will replace languages with for example data-flow 
concurrency support.

> 
>> My CPU is a Core i7, which is a quad-core.
> 
>> It also has SSE4.2
> 
> 1. Good for you.

I also have a Core i7. Jeff Atwood has one (http://www.codinghorror.com/
blog/archives/001316.html) - and he represents the average Joe Six-pack 
developer. They're pretty common these days, cheapest will cost you far 
less than $700..$800. I just upgraded from 12 GB to 24 GB of RAM - these 
have as much as six memory slots!