tooling quality and some random rant

Gary Whatmore no at spam.sp
Sun Feb 13 07:07:56 PST 2011


Paulo Pinto Wrote:

> "Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
> news:ij7v76$1q4t$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > ... (cutted) ...
> >
> > That's not the compiler, that's the linker. I don't know what linker DMD 
> > uses on OSX, but on Windows it uses OPTLINK which is written in 
> > hand-optimized Asm so it's really hard to change. But Walter's been 
> > converting it to C (and maybe then to D once that's done) bit-by-bit (so 
> > to speak), so linker improvements are at least on the horizon.
> >
> > ...
> 
> Why C and not directly D?
> 
> It is really bad adversting for D to know that when its creator came around 
> to
> rewrite the linker, Walter decided to use C instead of D.

I'm guessing that Walter feels more familiar and comfortable developing C/C++ instead of D. He's the creator of D, but has written very small amounts of D and probably cannot write idiomatic D very fluently. Another issue is the immature toolchain.

This might sound like blasphemy, but I believe the skills and knowledge for developing large scale applications in language XYZ cannot be extrapolated from small code snippets or from experience with projects in other languages. You just need to eat your own dogfood and get your feet wet by doing.

People like the Tango's 'kris' and this 'h3r3tic' are the real world D experts. Sadly they've all left D. We need a new generation of experts, because these old guys ranting about every issue are more harmful than good to the community.


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