Opinions on DConf talks

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Tue Jun 25 20:22:00 PDT 2013


On 26 June 2013 01:18, Joakim <joakim at airpost.net> wrote:

> I was underwhelmed by Manu's talk: too much low-level technical detail
> about the integration effort between C++ and D, not enough discussion of
> the benefits of using D.  The Q&A panel with Walter and Andrei should have
> been an hour, or until questions petered out, and held every day of DConf.
> :)
>

I'd like to add a few comments here, since I guess I didn't do so at the
conference.

I initially really wanted my talk to be as you say/hoped. But I started
down that path, and realised I didn't have anywhere near enough meat to
fill an hour.
The truth is, integration of D with our workflow took a lot longer than
we'd hoped, and in some ways it's a miracle we persisted...
We got caught up on endless stumbling blocks, but the whole time, we could
see the light at the end of the tunnel. Just one last hurdle... yay... oh,
no actually... just one last hurdle... [repeat].
The segment at the start of my talk wrangling compilers, runtime libraries,
IDE's, debuginfo... this actually took probably 80-90% of our time. I had a
lot more slides in there previously, but it felt like they were a bit of a
downer, and not that interesting, so I took them out and just summarised.

As a result, when I wrote the talk, there wasn't as much code written in D
as I'd originally hoped, or enough time spent by the average programmer
writing D code that I could draw strong conclusions of the type you'd have
liked to hear about.
In the end, I thought it was more valuable to discuss our hurdles, and
justify some of the design points, requirements, and reasons behind
language features I had pushed for.
I think what I wanted as the most important take-away from my talk, was to
generate discussions to make sure other companies approaching D cold, as we
did, don't need to go through the same painful lead-in process in the
future.
Additionally, the design of our framework, which is a fairly solid piece of
work, may be of interest to others looking to do similar things. It ended
up with a good block in the middle, which I admit, does appear to be the
focus since it was pretty hard to summarise, and dominates the slides. I
hope it was interesting at least. It was something concrete that I could
share.

At the end of the day, you all know what D code looks like anyway. When our
guys write D code, it looks more or less like you expect, and it just
works. Nothing really special about it.
Naturally, I couldn't discuss specifics of code written in D, since they're
game-specific features, and protected by NDA.

In the last segment, I did give a high-level glance over some of the things
that basically all our programmers upon first contact immediately
appreciated when working with D. Maybe they seem trivial, but it doesn't
hurt to re-enforce that they are very strong features of the language that
everyone falls in love with immediately.

I guess, in summary, sorry you were underwhelmed/disappointed. To be
honest, I was too, I'd hoped I could offer more. I think a lot of other
people did too... but maybe next year there will be another one with an
additional year's practical experience...? :)
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