Poll: Primary D version

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Sat May 22 09:42:11 PDT 2010


On 05/22/2010 08:29 AM, Robert Clipsham wrote:
> On 20/05/10 07:52, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> I'm interested in trying to gauge the current state of D version
>> usage, so
>> I've set up a poll:
>>
>> http://micropoll.com/t/KEFfsZBH5F
>>
>> I apologize for using MicroPoll (and all its
>> manditory-JavaScript-ness). I
>> personally hate MicroPoll but everything else I've seen is even worse
>> and I
>> don't have time to make a custom one.
>
> I put my vote with D1 & 2, although truthfully I've moved back to D1 for
> the most part. I found D2 almost impossible to use, for a few reasons:
>
> - Safe D was impossible to use due to phobos not supporting this
> (although this seems to be close to a fix)
> - Interfacing to C libraries is now overly complex thanks to const
> correctness. After updating all the function signatures I found phobos
> was completely lacking the functions to convert between C and D strings
> of varying constness or with different encodings (char/wchar/dchar).. I
> ended up writing my own functions

Could you please give more detail on that? There should be essentially 
no problem with using C-style strings with D regardless of constness.

> - to!() didn't work in most cases where I tried to use it, I ended up
> writing my own conversion functions

to is deliberately defined to be restrictive; parse is more forgiving. 
Anyway, I'd be glad to improve to if you gave me a few hints.

> - Various bugs I encountered which have already been reported (I forget
> which ones).
> - Lack of an x86_64 compiler. I spent far too long messing around
> setting up a multilib system, and ended up making a chroot for dmd. This
> is far too much effort/messing around, and should I ever feel there's a
> use for my apps outside of localhost people will wonder why they don't
> support x86_64 natively (I believe this will change after D2 from
> various comments from Walter).
> - Lack of containers in phobos, although dcollections may have solved
> this now, I haven't had chance to look
>
> There were some other reasons I've forgotten, but until at least some of
> these are fixed I'll stick to D1/Tango... I hope I can move back to D2
> at some point in the future once it's stabilized a bit more.

Yah, for most of these things are definitely looking up. Thanks, and I'd 
appreciate any more detail you might have.


Andrei


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