Spellechecker - is this really fun?

lurker lurk at lurk.com
Sun May 9 11:25:52 PDT 2010


Eldar Insafutdinov Wrote:

> 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.

I think your post hits the nail directly on the head. People expect commitment and quality these days. Even open source developers expect quality. The competition is huge on compiler market. You have serious competitors like gcc, llvm/clang, ghc, icc, java's jit etc. These have superior performance and dmd has serious problems that make for instance expression templates dead slow in high performance computing. The standard library version of xml parser also sucks, Tango has world class implementation.

It's sad to say this, but d2/phobos cannot be used in high performance application development during the next 5 to 10 years. It's also bad for graphical end user applications because the garbage collector is bad and performance wise it cannot win c++ & Qt. So what's left? Open source hobby projects.

If you're a commercial user, you must be able to buy support. At this pace, even if you shoved tons of dollars to the core developer (yes, there's only one - a huge risk for any 3rd party), nothing will change because D seems to be a hobby project. I don't know why W is writing code and documentation so slowly. I don't know why he doesn't hire more developers (open source developers are free!). I can only imagine that he doesn't want anyone to participate, because it's his language and it would be shameful if some random community member could achieve similar results. There are also intellectual property taint issues as we saw with Tango vs Phobos.


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