D Language 2.0

[Nick Sabalausky]

"retard" <re at tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:hj1hfe$1bp4$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.
>

Right, but like I had said below that, D isn't really usable for embedded 
ATM, so until that happens (and I'm *really* anxious to see that happen), D 
is still desktop-only, and even on the lowest-end desktops 80k is nothing.

>> 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.
>

Right.

>>> 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.
>

I can totally accept that 486 in particular is pretty much dead, but unless 
there's some specific advantage that can be only be gained by breaking 486 
support, I see no reason for "It supports 486" to be something worth whining 
about.

>>> 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!

Or, people like me who can do everything they need to do on a 32-bit 
single-core just fine, can just stick with it and use those hundreds of 
dollars on something that actually fucking matters.

Where the fuck are you people living that you can act as if $700-$800 were 
pocket change to be casually tossed around? LA? Tokyo? Hawaii? Your own 
little private islands? Delusion-land, most likely.