GCC 4.6

[Iain Buclaw]

== Quote from Emil Madsen (sovende at gmail.com)'s article
> --90e6ba539f3ee121840495d5033f
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> On 25 November 2010 00:25, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> > Emil Madsen wrote:
> >
> >> And yea, bearophile brings up a lot of nice features, and Walter would
> >> never have a chance to implement all of them himself, which might be good,
> >> if everything bearophile suggests got into the language, we would have this
> >> major language noone would ever be able to learn, nor use. However, if we
> >> succeed in implementing the best ideas I do think we'll end up with a superb
> >> output, however I do think we need to discuss a lot of issues and features,
> >> and thats why I love bearophiles postings, simply because it gives the
> >> community a lot to discuss.
> >>
> >> Just my opinion. - But I do think discussing a lot of features, even the
> >> ones not really related, will help out the language in the end.
> >>
> >
> > I think bearophile does a valuable service to us by bringing up discussion
> > topics.
> >
> > My gripe is when he lists things that he wishes D did when D already does
> > them and has for years. Case in point: D imports. It's irksome when he often
> > writes from the perspective of assuming that D does it wrong while other
> > languages are assumed to do it right. Case in point: design by contract, and
> > his assumption that dmd was a primitive compiler that did not do data flow
> > analysis while praising llvm's.
> >
> > My concern about that is that with the volume of his posts, I will miss
> > some of them, and people inexperienced with D will presume those mistakes
> > and misunderstandings are correct.
> >
> > I have no issue at all with bringing up factual shortcomings of D, even
> > when I disagree about whether they are actual shortcomings or not. For
> > example, it is a fact that D does not check for integer arithmetic overflow.
> > Whether that's a problem or not is a fine topic for discussion.
> >
> Well I must agree with you, atleast on the part, about how he sometimes
> seems negative about what dmd does. - And that tune, is obviously not nice
> towards you, as your the one doing the hard work, but lets just try to
> remember, that bearophile just wants D to be the best, eh?
> What really is an issue for me currently, is that the mailing list seems
> like its going a tad into war, that is between you and bearophile sometimes;
> wheres you should instead be joining forces. - As it seems to me, D got
> about the best compiler writer out there, and one of the best feature
> requester/discusser :).
> And I can understand you concerns, about how newcomers to D, might react
> reading about all of these things bearophile complains about, and wants to
> change/add.
> - Just curious, how much of your time do you spend on reading this mailing
> list a day?
> (Excuse my somewhat bad english tonight (its 3am))

He's started peeking an interest at GDC too, which was both amusing and heartening
to see. I don't honestly think any of his comments can really be seen as
complaints. As has already been echoed, most are very informative, he always seems
to pick up on things you don't commonly think about. Then again, I can see it can
get a bit tiring how he almost always starts off with "Language/Compiler <Y> does
<Feature X>", then goes on to explain that yours doesn't. This is where I see
myself going terse over things very quickly.

I think you wrongly see things as war-like. It's all really just healthy
discussion and competition.