What are the worst parts of D?

Manu via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Oct 8 07:08:33 PDT 2014


On 08/10/2014 11:55 pm, "Manu" <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 08/10/2014 9:20 pm, "Don via Digitalmars-d" <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 19:07:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >>
> >> On 10/6/14, 11:55 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 06:13:41PM +0000, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 16:06:04 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >>>
> >>> [...]
> >>>>>
> >>>>> It would be terrific if Sociomantic would improve its communication
> >>>>> with the community about their experience with D and their needs
> >>>>> going forward.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> How about someone starts paying attention to what Don posts? That
> >>>> could be an incredible start. I spend great deal of time both reading
> >>>> this NG (to be aware of what comes next) and writing (to express both
> >>>> personal and Sociomantic concerns) and have literally no idea what
can
> >>>> be done to make communication more clear.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I don't remember who it was, but I'm pretty sure *somebody* at
> >>> Sociomantic has stated clearly their request recently: Please break
our
> >>> code *now*, if it helps to fix language design issues, rather than
> >>> later.
> >>
> >>
> >> More particulars would be definitely welcome. I should add that
Sociomantic has an interesting position: it's a 100% D shop so
interoperability is not a concern for them, and they did their own GC so
GC-related improvements are unlikely to make a large difference for them.
So "C++ and GC" is likely not to be high priority for them. -- Andrei
> >
> >
> > Exactly. C++ support is of no interest at all, and GC is something we
contribute to, rather than something we expect from the community.
> > Interestingly we don't even care much about libraries, we've done
everything ourselves.
> >
> > So what do we care about? Mainly, we care about improving the core
product.
> >
> > In general I think that in D we have always suffered from spreading
ourselves too thin. We've always had a bunch of cool new features that
don't actually work properly. Always, the focus shifts to something else,
before the previous feature was finished.
> >
> > At Sociomantic, we've been successful in our industry using only the
features of D1. We're restricted to using D's features from 2007!!
Feature-wise, practically nothing from the last seven years has helped us!
> >
> > With something like C++ support, it's only going to win companies over
when it is essentially complete. That means that working on it is a huge
investment that doesn't start to pay for itself for a very long time. So
although it's a great goal, with a huge potential payoff, I don't think
that it should be consuming a whole lot of energy right now.
> >
> > And personally, I doubt that many companies would use D, even if with
perfect C++ interop, if the toolchain stayed at the current level.
> >
> > As I said in my Dconf 2013 talk -- I advocate a focus on Return On
Investment.
> > I'd love to see us chasing the easy wins.
>
> As someone who previously represented a business interest, I couldn't
agree more.
> Aside from my random frustrated outbursts on a very small set of language
issues, the main thing I've been banging on from day 1 is the tooling. Much
has improved, but it's still a long way from 'good'.
>
> Debugging, ldc (for windows), and editor integrations (auto complete,
navigation, refactoring tools) are my impersonal (and hopefully
non-controversial) short list. They trump everything else I've ever
complained about.
> The debugging experience is the worst of any language I've used since the
90's, and I would make that top priority.
>
> C++ might have helped us years ago, but I already solved those issues
creatively. Debugging can't be solved without tooling and compiler support.

Just to clarify, I'm all for nogc work; that is very important to us and I
appreciate the work, but I support that I wouldn't rate it top priority.
C++ is no significant value to me personally, or professionally. Game
studios don't use much C++, and like I said, we already worked around those
edges.

I can't speak for remedy now, but I'm confident that they will *need* ldc
working before the game ships. DMD codegen is just not good enough,
particularly relating to float; it uses the x87! O_O
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/digitalmars-d/attachments/20141009/bee62dbb/attachment.html>


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list