H1 2015 Priorities and Bare-Metal Programming

[Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d]

Am Sat, 31 Jan 2015 22:37:19 -0800
schrieb Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com>:

> On 1/31/2015 9:21 PM, Mike wrote:
> > Is D's core team genuinely interested in this domain?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> 
> > If you are genuinely interested, are you committed?  And if so,
> > what direction would you like to take?  So far, my ideas have been
> > very unpopular and I'm growing weary fighting the current. How can
> > I contribute in a way that gets us both where we want to go?
> 
> I don't recall what you've suggested in this vein that was very
> unpopular - can you please post an example?

Mike once complained that the runtime heavily relies on some high-level
OS features not available on embedded devices (e.g. threads). That's OK
if you actually have an OS, but druntime should be modular enough to
run on systems without thread support.

He got some very direct responses that told him that if an OS doesn't
have thread-support etc there's no use to run D on that. Responses like
that obviously demotivate people.

IIRC he also proposed moving more of TypeInfo implementation to the
runtime so TypeInfo layout can be modified by the runtime or even
completely avoided by not implementing it in the runtime. The main
response was that it complicates compiler code too much for little
benefit. Obviously bare-metal programmers might disagree on the little
benefit part and as Mike points out rust seems to do similar things.