D Users Survey: Primary OS?

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d]

On 30/05/2014 14:37, Dicebot wrote:
> On Friday, 30 May 2014 at 13:27:10 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> On 29/05/2014 22:12, Dicebot wrote:
>>> When similar question was asked during one of DConf talks vast majority
>>> raised their hands as Linux users ;)
>>>
>>> It is not that surprising considering D currently is most mature for all
>>> kinds of services and server-side applications and this is domain of
>>> Linux supreme uncontested rule.
>>
>> That might have some influence (the kind of apps that people are
>> making), but I disagree that it's the main factor.
>>
>> I suspect the poorer Windows D toolchain support  is a bigger influence.
>
> When volunteer effort is main development power actual use cases drive
> toolchain enhancements, not other way around. It is not like someone
> intentionally has made better tools for Linux just to make Windows
> people sad.
>
> Also native platform tools being open-source greatly helps in building D
> ones on top. Remember that Walters article about adding 64-bit support
> to DMD? He had to effectively reverse engineer object file format to
> become compatible with Microsoft tools.

For sure, I wasn't saying the Linux D toolchain had more focus or more 
effort put into. It's most likely the other way around even: the Windows 
D toolchain had more focus and effort put into it!
It's just that despite that, it is poorer. And I agree, it's mainly 
because of Windows being closed-source and proprietary that it is harder 
to develop tool-chains. Especially for open-source developers (big 
companies might have resources to be able to ask help from Microsoft 
itself, but we can't).

I don't blame Walter for this, nor even do I think there's much more he 
can do to address this in a reasonable time frame. It's just too much 
effort for a single person.

I'm keeping my hopes on LLVM, and the work that is being done in LLDB 
for Windows. In the meanwhile, using VisualD as a standalone debugger 
might not be that bad, but it's still far from how better things are in 
Linux.

-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros