Let's give a honor to dead giants!

[Ary Manzana]

On 4/19/12 6:08 PM, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
> On Thursday, 19 April 2012 at 10:00:29 UTC, Denis Shelomovskij wrote:
>> D already has a history with heroes and great projects...
>> Unfortunately, lots of dead great projects. IMHO, a monument to them
>> should be set up.
>>
>> Reasons:
>>
>> 1. If a project failed because of some design issues (e.g. Descent)
>> new developers should be informed about a danger of this approach and
>> ways to fix it (links to discussions of making a library from a
>> compiler).
>>
>> 2. If a project failed because of past compiler bugs, lack of
>> developers (DDL?) or other solved/solvable things, new developers
>> should be able to easily find and start reanimation of this project.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>
> Great idea. In particular, I would be interested to have more
> information about Descent :)

Things to learn about Descent:

  * It's impossible for one/two men to continually port a project from 
one language to another (C++ to Java in this case)
  * D needs to be implemented as a library. This means no global 
variables and means to make it easy to build tools on top of it. I know 
of about two alternative new implementation of D (SDC and DCT) but for 
now they are making the same mistake as DMD: they use global variables. 
Also, the developers of those projects don't seem to have experience in 
writing compilers so the code is not very nice (though I saw a visitor 
in DCT). People suggest me to send pull requests or open issues to SDC, 
but if the main design has a big flaw it's better to start from scratch 
than to change the whole code.
  * Eclispe is great for writing IDEs but after programming in Ruby for 
some years now and exclusively using vim I can't go back to using a slow 
IDE so I don't think I'll ever write anything else for Eclipse.
  * Maybe it's better to implement things from scratch instead of 
starting with a project like JDT and modifying its source code to be 
usable as a D IDE. Though in the beginning you go faster later it slows 
you down more and more.
  * Maybe the project didn't recieve a lot of help because it was 
written in Java... don't know.