Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[F i L]

On Sunday, 15 January 2012 at 03:31:15 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 1/14/12 9:06 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Saturday, January 14, 2012 20:54:55 Michel Fortin wrote:
>>> Still, Walter perfectly has the right to decide on what he 
>>> wants to
>>> work. I understand that he saw implementing SIMD as an 
>>> interesting
>>> challenge, and if working on SIMD keeps things interesting 
>>> for him,
>>> that can only be great.
>>
>> Sure. I can understand why the most important thing to work  
>> on might not be
>> the most interesting thing to work on. And Walter certainly 
>> has the right to
>> work on whatever he wants to work on.
>
> Exactly and perfectly right. To add to that, with my limited 
> time, I can hardly afford to work on stuff that isn't fun 
> (although lately I've done some of it - e.g. I'm not a web 
> designer). There comes a point, however, when we need to decide 
> whether our main priority is having fun or making D successful.

I would argue that a happy coder is a productive coder. I'm 
personally very please Walter and others are so interested in 
SIMD support. Then again, it suites my interests so I admit bias.


> 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.
> 
> 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.

> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
> Andrei

To put it plainly, I wouldn't really be interested in D if it 
wasn't for game design and art applications. C/C++ has been 
loosing ground to languages like Java and C# in the 
business/server world for years because of painless development, 
fancy libraries, and features like Linq. But one area C/C++ still 
remain strong is among performance critical code. Given D's 
opening message: "Modeling power. Native efficiency." and it's 
goal of succeeding C++, I don't see how you can sideline one of 
C's most invested parties so easily.