Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

Peter Alexander peter.alexander.au at gmail.com
Sun Jan 15 03:30:38 PST 2012


On 15/01/12 3:31 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> 1. SIMD is not the top of the list. Two weeks ago it wasn't _on_ the
> list. Now it's like the last 'copter outta Saigon.

That's not true. SIMD intrinsics has always been on the list. I've only 
been in this newsgroup for a year or so, but I've definitely seen D's 
lack of SIMD support mentioned in several discussions so far. It's a 
frequent complaint about the language.


> 2. We haven't identified game designers as a core market, and one that's
> more important than e.g. general purpose programmers who need the like
> of working qualifiers, multithreading, and shared libraries.

Game programming is quite clearly a very large market for D. The game 
industry is perhaps one of the largest software industries that still 
relies on having C/C++ level of efficiency and low-level access. It's 
also an industry that is absolutely sick of having to use C++. D is 
quite close to the perfect language for game developers.

I think it's also telling that perhaps the most prolific (ex-)D coder, 
Tomasz, was a game programmer, and that one of the largest D libraries 
is Derelict, which is also aimed at games.

Finally, if you look at the dsource projects, 
http://dsource.org/projects/ you'll see that Games make up quite a large 
chunk of what people are using D for.

What do you think our core market is?


> 3. There was never a promise or even a mention that we'll deliver SIMD.
> We virtually promise we deliver threads and expressive qualifiers, and
> there's still work to do on that.

Fair point.


> 4. There was broad agreement that the main foci going forward would be
> quality, expressive qualifiers, shared libraries, Phobos work, and
> publicizing the language. We can't work with and publicize D's awesome
> concurrency design if parts of it aren't implemented.

I suspect that SIMD support will greatly help to publicize the language.


> 5. The SIMD work has _zero_ acceleration on existing code; it only
> allows experts to write non-portable code that uses SIMD instructions.
> Updating to the next release of dmd has zero SIMD-related benefit to
> statistically our entire user base.

Where are you getting the figures for the % of people that will benefit 
from SIMD support? The SIMD support thread is rather large, so that 
suggests to me that a significant number of people are quite interested 
in the SIMD work.


> Walter and I spend hours on the phone discussing strategies and tactics
> to make D more successful. And then comes this binge. Doing anything on
> SIMD now is a mistake that I am sorry I was unable to stop. About the
> only thing that's good about it all is that it'll be over soon.

I can't speak on your private conversations with Walter, but I think 
you're underestimating how important SIMD support is for D.

Also, it appears (from his rate of progress) that Walter is quite 
enjoying the SIMD work. I see no harm in a short-lived "binge" if it 
reinvigorates Walter's interest in compiler work -- especially if you 
please a large part of the community in the process.



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