dmd codegen improvements

[Casual D user via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 28 August 2015 at 21:59:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/28/2015 4:18 AM, Temtaime wrote:
>> Are you sure that ONE Walter can achieve what they done ?
>
> People told me I couldn't write a C compiler, then told me I 
> couldn't write a C++ compiler. I'm still the only person who 
> has ever implemented a complete C++ compiler (C++98). Then they 
> all (100%) laughed at me for starting D, saying nobody would 
> ever use it.
>
> My whole career is built on stepping over people who told me I 
> couldn't do anything and wouldn't amount to anything.
>
> LLVM is a fine compiler, but there's nothing magical about it.
>
> Besides, we have a secret productivity enhancing weapon that 
> LLVM doesn't have - D!
>
> Now, if I can only tear myself away from the internet for a 
> while...

The problem is that you're pretty much the face of D along with 
Andrei. Andrei announcing he was quitting Facebook to work on D 
fulltime was one of the most popular articles on Reddit's 
programming subreddit in the past month.


Someone picks up D, and realizes that out of the box it has a 
full stop the world 1960s-style garbage collector completely 
wrapped in a mutex, can't inline constructors/destructors, 
basically non-functioning RTTI, no safe way to manage resources, 
a type system with massive holes in it, type qualifiers being 
suggestions, the non-proprietary compilers that generate faster 
code lag a year+ behind. Even more than this, D has no real IDE 
integration like C++ or Java, and none is even being worked on as 
far as I'm aware. D is advertised as a system's language, but 
most of the built-in language features require the GC so you 
might as well just use C if you can't use the GC. There's other 
things I can't remember right now.

Then they come to the forums and see the head people of D working 
on ... DMD codegen improvements. That inspires a lot of 
confidence that these issues will get fixed beyond fixing them 
yourself - because that's what everyone adopting a new language 
wants to do.

Do you know what the most complaints about D in the reddit thread 
were? D's incredibly old garbage collector, a complete lack of a 
good IDE, and a lack of good manual memory management utilities.

I'm not blaming you, I'm just not sure if you're aware of what 
this looks like. If you intend for D to be a hobby project, then 
continue on.