Biggest Issue with D - Definition and Versioning

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, January 15, 2012 18:42:25 Kiith-Sa wrote:
> To be clear: I'm not saying that fixing the advertised features is
> unimportant. In fact, the greatest problems I see in promoting D are that
> we don't even have finished containers in the API - and that many features
> described in TDPL don't work correctly. But I find the statement that SIMD
> is a waste of time, or, for that matter, that it will help little in
> promoting D's adoption - to be completely incorrect.


I think that given what D is setting out to do, game developers are among its 
target user base and that if we can add features to the language or libraries 
which make D more reasonable for them, that's great. Having SIMD support is 
definitely not a bad thing. Personally, I will _never_ use it, but it's 
something that C/C++ can do on many compilers and having that in D doesn't 
hurt people like me who don't care about the feature at all.

The problem is that there are more important things that not only affect game 
developers but affect developers in general which D already promises to do but 
fails to do. So, stuff like SIMD should be relatively low on the priority list 
until the more general purpose features have been fully implemented. And given 
that the general purpose stuff _also_ affects the game devs, I would have 
thought that they'd also really want that fixed soon, just like everyone else. 
Some of the same people who are clamoring for SIMD have been clamoring for 
fixes to const.

Walter is free to spend his time how he chooses. I don't really want to bash 
him for going off and doing something different and interesting, but I do think 
that from the perspective of the D community at large, the SIMD work is not 
something that's high enough on the priority list to be done right now. 
Eventually, yes, but not now.

So, hopefully it doesn't take much longer for the SIMD stuff to be sorted out, 
and then progress can be made on the more general purpose stuff again.

- Jonathan M Davis