Had another 48hr game jam this weekend...

[Iain Buclaw]

On 3 September 2013 21:30, Ramon <spam at thanks.no> wrote:
> Someone wrote sth along the line of "How egotistical! Some want
> this and want that. D doesn't get better or more popular by
> wanting ever more things".
>
> I'll very soon begin to work on a project. Originally it was
> planned to it in Ada. Relevant feature sets are roughly equal
> with D offering a little more (like comfortable unittests) and
> Ada being well proven.
>
> I *want* to go D. And I would, of course, gladly tell everyone
> who doesn't run away fast enough that our application is
> developed in D.(The application will quite probably have a good,
> even international visibility but by no means be major or widely
> known. The major (and very well useable, not "crippled") part of
> it will be free, btw.)
>
> In other words: One can contribute also by using (and talking
> about) D - not only by defending it teeth and claws or by writing
> code for or around D itself.
>
> Here is my current resumee:
>
> - dmd not debuggable -> not an acceptable solution, no matter how
> fast it compiles.
> - gdc possibly still buggy (Disclaimer: Probably it was just bad
> luck that I fell over a bug (not even an important one) and am a
> little wary now - No offense intended. I'm immensely grateful
> that with gdc there is an alternative and, even better, GDB
> *works* with gdc - hurray!!)

The current development of gdc passes 100% unittests and testsuite, so
that gives me confidence to say that codegen bugs are very unlikely to
be found in gdc.


> - gdc (2): I have to either use an old version (4.63) or build it
> myself along with gcc, which is a major hurdle

That is an old version.  As I dropped gcc-4.6 support in mainline
development back in April 2012.

> - Can I trust the GDC guys, are they professionals? My impression
> so far: Yes. That's important to me because GDC clearly is the
> compiler I'd go with.

You can trust me. :o)

> - Will they provide at least GDC 4-7 binaries (they did for GDC
> 4-6 (debian)) - dunno. Would be a very big Plus.

gdc-4.7 was skipped because of lack of time I could dedicate.  This
time around have collaborated with doko (gcc maintainer for
debian/ubuntu) and gdc 4.8 is available in debian unstable.  It is
recent enough using 2.062 front-end.

> In summary, my resumee is quite positive (if with quite some
> bumps) but *THE* go or break issue is debugging with dmd and GDC
> being reliable. For the former I don't hold my breath, for the
> latter I'm quite positively looking ahead.
>

Find a bug in gdc -> report it.  Otherwise saying it is unreliable
with no basis is pretty useless to me  (I use it day in day out
without problems).

-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';