Advocacy (Was: Who here actually uses D?)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:ifpdbd$drd$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky:
>
>> Hmm, from that I get the impression that Linus is basically just like the
>> old Java-evangelists except instead of OO being his silver bullet, it's
>> zero-abstraction. I'm almost suprised he allows things like functions, or
>> anything other than Asm for that matter, or cares about portability. I
>> really doubt he'd like D. Maybe he'd dislike parts of it less than C++, 
>> but
>> that's probably about it.
>
> Why do you think he doesn't care about Linux portability?
>

I didn't say that I don't think he cares about portability, I just meant 
that from that one post it seemed like he was opposed to abstractions. With 
"portability", I was just pointing out the silliness and self-contradiction 
of that stance.

> I've seen Linux broken by compiler optimizations present in new GCC 
> versions. If you write very important C code that breaks if you optimize 
> it in new ways (see pointer aliasing troubles), you grow dislike for 
> compilers. He needs a dumb C compiler that doesn't do what it likes. If 
> you write the code he writes, then probably you learn to appreciate the 
> same things he likes. He's not the only person that's writing Linux, the 
> other people after so many years keep doing the same things he is doing, 
> so probably his choices are not so dumb for their job.
>

Right. And I have no doubt about that. It just sounded like he was insisting 
that such measures were every bit as necessary and appropriate for 
application software, too. Of course, I'm usually one of the first people to 
get annoyed by slow code and techniques being considered "good enough" in 
application development, but he seems to be taking it a bit far.