Daily downloads in decline

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 10/06/2015 7:35 p.m., Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 10 June 2015 at 09:11, Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com <mailto: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. :-)

Thanks, I just wish we weren't in the current situation hardware wise.