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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