Tail pad optimization, cache friendlyness and C++ interrop

Artur Skawina via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Jun 19 04:12:28 PDT 2014


On 06/18/14 18:42, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 18 June 2014 at 11:09:14 UTC, Artur Skawina via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> The number of potential contributors is
>> already low enough, and the fuzzy licensing situation drives away the
>> most valuable ones (since those will often be the ones which treat the
>> legal aspects seriously and the risks involved when dealing with this
>> kind of mixed free and proprietary code within one repo are too high).
> 
> Wait what? Do you know a single person who decided to not work on DMD FE because of kind of formally (but not practically) non-free backend?

Well, do you think I would have said what I did if this issue didn't
affect /me/? [1]

The problem is a very practical one. Walter's complaint about the
lack of constructive contributions is justified; most of the language
related discussions happening here are nothing more than wish lists.
There are many different causes, I'm pointing out one.
What's unique about this one is that there's only one person in the
world that can do something about it -- the same task done by someone
other than Walter Bright would not be equally valuable.

The shared frontend+backend setup might not be just convenience, but
a deliberate attempt to discourage certain developments -- even then,
I think it does much more harm than good. It practically inhibits
"casual" contributions, while not really restricting usages that bring
few benefits to the original project. 

And, yes, some people really always check licenses, even before fully
determining what a software project actually is/does. Because if the
license is problematic then everything else is irrelevant -- the project
simply is unusable, and any time spent looking at it would be wasted.

That is fortunately not a problem for dmdfe, as boost/gpl should be
ok for (almost) everyone. But the cost of having to deal with another
license, for a bundled part, that you're never going to use and are not
even interested in, is there. The cost of scratching-an-itch also
becomes higher. Depending on person/context, these costs can be
prohibitive.

artur

[1] If I knew I would be replying like this, I would have worded that
    quoted statement a bit differently; I'm not quite that arrogant. :)


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