More radical ideas about gc and reference counting

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon May 5 07:18:45 PDT 2014


On Mon, May 05, 2014 at 06:16:34AM +0000, Arlen via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sunday, 4 May 2014 at 22:56:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >On Sat, May 03, 2014 at 10:48:47PM -0500, Caligo via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >[...]
> >>Last but not least, currently there are two main ways for new
> >>features to make it into D/Phobos: you either have to belong to the
> >>inner circle, or have to represent some corporation that's doing
> >>something with D.
> >
> >I'm sorry, but this is patently false. I am neither in the inner
> >circle, nor do I represent any corporation, yet I've had many changes
> >pulled into Phobos (including brand new code).
> >
> >I can't say I'm perfectly happy with the D development process
> >either, but this kind of accusation is bordering on slander, and
> >isn't helping anything.
[...]
> There is a lot of truth in what Caligo has said, but I would word
> that part of it differently.
> 
> A couple years ago I submitted std.rational, but it didn't go
> anywhere.  About a year later I discovered that someone else had
> done a similar thing, but it never made it into Phobos either.
> Of course, it's not because we didn't belong to some "inner
> circle", but I think it has to do with the fact that D has a very
> poor development process.  The point being, something as simple
> as a Rational library shouldn't take years for it to become part
> of Phobos, specially when people are taking the time to do the
> work.
[...]

This wording is much more acceptable. ;-) While I think accusations of
an "elite inner circle" are unfounded (and unfair), I do agree with the
sentiment. I think some time ago there was some talk about very old pull
requests that have been stuck at the bottom of the queue for months or
even years, and nobody was looking at them. I don't know what came out
of that talk, though -- apparently not very much. :-(

OTOH, I did find that stubbornness and persistence help. If you keep
pestering everybody about your new contribution, and keep pushing it
even if people seem to ignore/dislike it, keep updating your pull even
if it seems nobody cares, eventually somebody will take notice and do
something about it. Of course, this is not ideal -- open source projects
really should be actively welcoming new contributions, not merely
passively accepting them -- but that's the way it is right now, and I'm
not sure how to change that.  Perhaps stubborn and persistent pestering
of the PTBs until they change?  Might help, you never know. ;-)


T

-- 
Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn


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