Spellechecker - is this really fun?

[Walter Bright]

lurker wrote:
> 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.

Expression templates are slow? Do you mean compiling them or executing them? 
Also, expression templates as I've seen them used in C++ are well supplanted by 
CTFE in D.

> The standard library version of xml parser also sucks,

That's true.

> 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.

I don't agree with tis.

> So what's left? Open source hobby projects.
> 
> If you're a commercial user, you must be able to buy support.

And you can.

> 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!).

With tons of dollars yes, full time developers could and would be hired.

> 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.

At this point, that's an issue for the individual Tango developers to sort out. 
A number of them have already moved a lot of quality code into Phobos and 
removed the licensing problem (the binary attribution clause). You mentioned 
Tango's XML parser - if the developer(s) of that module wish to relicense it and 
have it put in Phobos, it would be welcome.