Spellechecker - is this really fun?

Eldar Insafutdinov e.insafutdinov at gmail.com
Sun May 9 10:53:40 PDT 2010


bearophile Wrote:

> Be gentle, he is working for free for an open source language you too can use. He's not a bug-fixing robot, I think that being a mammal he needs some fun once in a while :-)

And I appreciate that. Even more, we all love the good stuff that D offers you. But it's wrong to say that because it is open source, it has to be fun. Successful open source projects have very strict management, just like in the commercial software development. Python or llvm are good examples of that. Just because the project is opensource it doens't mean that developers have less responsibility. We are all trying to make D successful, a book is about to come out. It is not a toy project, people rely on it. The main page says "Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python." I can't see the its productivity if I am stuck with a compiler bug. And I am developing a non-commercial open source project too. What if it was commercial? What would I tell my boss? "There's a compiler bug, and I have no idea when it will be fixed". It's been reported for a month, yet there's no comment from compiler developers on it. Bearing in mind that some important bugs stay in bugzilla for years I can assume the same for this bug. Would my boss like this uncertainty? Nobody wants to loose money.

I am not trying to be an asshole here. All of this comes from actually using D. Also I am not begging for fixing that particular bug. I am not in the position of dictating D's development. But a good example for you: I've noticed in the LLVM bugzilla, that Chris Lattner, the leader of the project, comments almost immediately on bugs. I don't see similair things happening in D, even considering that LLVM is used much wider and it's more difficult to control everything for one person.


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