Daily downloads in decline

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 10 June 2015 at 09:11, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On 10/06/2015 7:02 p.m., deadalnix wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 04:55:43 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>>
>>> I think that a lot of the people asking for a 2.067 LDC are just users
>>>> of D, and (I am including myself in this group) a lot of those people
>>>> don't know the first thing about LLVM or good complier design in
>>>> general. While it may seem dishonest for people to ask for these things
>>>> and not help, keep in mind that the vast majority of programmers are not
>>>> even able to help.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I for one would love to help. But I barely understand X86. Not to
>>> mention having to get a setup going ext. Not really worth it right now
>>> for me.
>>>
>>> Although I'd rather work on SDC instead of LDC. Primarily because well
>>> it's so shinyyyyyy.
>>>
>>> I would be happy to write a book to teach compiler development from
>>> everything from basic x86 encoding to complex optimization strategies.
>>> If only I knew it and yes I know they exist just wrong method for
>>> teaching it IMO.
>>>
>>
>> Lately, I've been listening to a playlist of interview, presentations
>> and other thing involving Elon Musk. The playlist is hours long and I'm
>> listening to it while doing other things.
>>
>> After selling paypal, Musk wanted to use part of his money to revive the
>> desire to explore space. What he plan to do is to send a plant on Mars,
>> a very symbolic stunt that would, he hopes, renew the interest in space
>> exploration, maybe increase NASA funding or whatnot.
>>
>> Thing is, he doesn't know about space that much. He has a physic major
>> working on batteries, and then went to have a payment processing
>> company. So he could have said, like you guys, "well I don't know much
>> about space/compiler let's wait for others to make things happen". But
>> nope, he went to talk to space specialists, engineer and scientists, and
>> then, went got in touch with some Russian to buy refurbished ICBM in
>> order to start experimenting.
>>
>> One of the notable thing is how amazed people are that he went to buy
>> ICBM from the russian. Well guess what, that is one of the cheapest
>> thing that can go into space, so if you want to make something happen,
>> that is an excellent starting point.
>>
>> I can continue the story with myself (because everyone knows I compare
>> to Elon in so many ways, and he is greatly inspired by my vision and
>> capability to make things happen). Recently I got to a point on SDC
>> where working on the GC became an important item. Thing is, I know about
>> compiler not memory allocator. Having low level knowledge of how the CPU
>> operate does not provide me wisdom about what kind of algorithm and
>> datastructure will behave nicely on a typical wokload.
>>
>> So I went to read tcmalloc source code, jemalloc source code, libc's
>> malloc, I read a ton of paper about various allocators, and went after
>> Jason Evan - one of the great perk of working for Facebook is to have
>> all these amazing people who can make you feel like an idiot because
>> they know so much more than you do - as to get as much of the "why" as
>> possible. the code told me the "what/how" but that is not sufficient to
>> get a good grasp of the matter at hand.
>>
>> Making things happen is not about waiting for the wisdom to fall from
>> the sky to deliver you the deep and arcane knowledge of compiler/memory
>> management/rocketry . It is about learning enough to get started, and
>> then start do do thing while continuing to learn more.
>>
>> To get back on point, yes some task in LDC or SDC (or DMD, or GDC)
>> require some good knowledge of compiler stuff. Obviously, these are
>> compiler, and I'd add D compiler, which involve a certain level of
>> complexity. But let's be honest, a good chunk of the work is not guru
>> level compiler arcane. Most of the work is actually dumb shit that just
>> need to be done like it is for all other software.
>>
>> You don't wait to know how to paint like Rembrandt to start painting.
>> Because that will never happen. You just paint dumb shit again and
>> again, trying to make the new shit a bit less shitty than the old shit.
>> You do that while studying Rembrandt's techniques. And, after thousand
>> of painting, you finally get there.
>>
>
> I'm well aware.
> I've been hammering out over long term to learn the underlying
> technologies.
> For example writing a PE-COFF linker.
>
> My experience is well ugh lets just say, if something seems hard and
> almost impossible maybe something isn't quite right.
>
> Unfortunately I'm in a war of attrition trying to learn x86 and friends.
> And its a long one!
>

Good luck with that. :-)
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