Ben Gertzfield is our 11th mentor

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 19.04.2011 02:40, schrieb jasonw:
> bearophile Wrote:
> 
>> Eric Poggel (JoeCoder):
>>
>>> Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D?  It would be very 
>>> interesting to know.
>>
>> It seems D at Facebook is becoming a bit like Go at Google :-)
>>
>> Both firms use several languages (Google uses Python, a quite restricted C++, Java, JavaScript, Sawzall, a bit of Go, not-languages as Protocol Buffers, etc), both need to process very large amounts of data in reasonable time frames, and probably both firms feel the need of a language that's almost as fast as C++ (and C) but less bug-prone, simpler and able to lead to faster development, and apparently for them Java is not fit enough for this purpose (maybe for the Java lack of manual control of memory layout of data structures, that leads to higher heap memory usage and less performance in some cases).
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
> 
> D isn't tainted by any big "political" organization yet. For example Go is Google's, JVM stuff is dictated by Oracle, .NET stuff by Microsoft, Obj-C by Apple. I believe Facebook needs its own language and using D as this kind of political platform is a way to fight the other giant corporations.

We don't even know yet if D is really used much within Facebook and what
it is used for.

> 
> Facebook also needs an incompatible language to improve their vendor lock-in later in coming markets. For example the rumored Facebook phone. It would be benefical for them to use some totally incompatible language to prevent code from leaking to other platforms, most notably Android and iOS. It would be benefical for D to be used as this kind of weapon because Facebook would pay the community and Walter a lot. D standard lib would also be incompatible with C libraries in other systems. I think it's a worthy goal, why should we pretend otherwise? No successful platform is politically neutral. Thoughts?

I totally disagree :)

Facebook has Open Sourced a lot of their technology (e.g. Thrift, Hive,
HipHop) - so I don't think they're heading for a vendor lock-in with
their technology or want "their own" language.
Furthermore I don't think a Facebook-phone using a programming language
totally incompatible to iOS and Android would succeed. iOS and Android
is to big to have totally incompatible competition (for smartphones) -
that competition will just fail. As an app-developer you don't want to
develop totally seperate versions for each platform.
(Right now, especially for games, you can develop most stuff in C and
then call that C-Code from Objective-C or Java/Dalvik, as far as I know)
I'd love to see the possibility to develop in D for smartphones in
general (esp. iOS and Android, maybe Windows Phone if anybody will ever
use it), though. But that'd require a port of a compiler and runtime to
ARM (and the specific operating systems, of course).

I rather think Facebook would use D for internal stuff that needs high
performance - stuff that they'd previously would have done in C++.
That Andrei wants Thrift bindings for D kind of suggests this ;)

It'd be great if Facebook used D and write articles about it. It'd get
us a lot attention. However I'm not sure if that is good as long as
Phobos is in it's current state - important stuff will be rewritten
(streams, XML support), so I don't think D2 is ready for a lot of public
attention yet.

I'd really hate to see D become a weapon of some corporation.
It's really great if corporations use it and support it, but D should
stay independent and neutral.
In the end, if that corporation goes out of business, D would die as
well. Do you think anybody would care about Objective-C without Apple?
Or about Java, if it had been limited to Suns products?
What about successful languages like C(++) or Python? I think they were
and still are pretty neutral (even though at least C and C++ were
developed at a commercial company).

So no, it's not a worthy goal to become Facebooks (or anybody elses)
weapon (and nothing suggests they want that) and I personally would stop
using D if something like that happened.

(Hope that all makes sense, it's kind of late ;-))

Cheers,
- Daniel


PS: Welcome, Ben :-)