Who here actually uses D?

Caligo iteronvexor at gmail.com
Sat Jan 1 17:56:54 PST 2011


On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Robert Clipsham
<robert at octarineparrot.com>wrote:

> On 01/01/11 22:48, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
>> I've done my doctoral work in D, which was a pretty large project for
>> one person (I guess a few tens of KLOC).
>>
>> I've also hit unpleasant bugs on occasion as those you mention - it's
>> very jarring. I wonder how we could improve the process to give special
>> priority to issues that (a) waste a lot of time tracking down, and (b)
>> have no or difficult workarounds.
>>
>
> Unfortunately, it's impossible to create such a system without people being
> paid to work on dmd and the runtime - people will fix the bugs they want to,
> you can't make them fix anything. Obviously you can influence what gets
> fixed, not to a huge extent though. Ideally the voting system would outline
> what needs the most effort, but people don't idle on bugzilla enough for it
> to work so well. I wonder if changing the 'vote' button to a 'like' button
> would make any difference, if facebook's any indication, people like to like
> things ;p
>
>  Andrei
>>
>
> I guess I should probably apologise if I sounded hot-headed at all in my
> post too - just had a rather stressful evening battling with compiler bugs -
> one of those ones that seems to morph into about 3 or 4 other bugs as you
> narrow it down, and each compiler you try yields a completely different
> result at the end of it. I decided to give up, rant, relax, and leave it for
> another day!
>
> --
> Robert
> http://octarineparrot.com/
>

I don't understand why so much time and effort as been spent, perhaps
wasted, on multiple compilers and standard libraries.  I also don't
understand why Walter insists on having his own compiler when D has finally
been declared an open source project.  LLVM and GCC are very mature projects
and they could have been used for the reference implementation.  If Walter
was in charge of the GDC or LDC project, then we would have had a better
compiler than what we have today.  That way I think D as a new modern
programming language could have been in a much better position.  You also
don't need to pay people to fix bugs or do whatever that is needed to be
done so long as you have a healthy and growing open source community.  I
don't think we have that yet, and perhaps the fact that Walter comes from
the closed-source proprietary world is part of the reason.

I highly recommend The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

That's just me and I could be wrong.
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