Community Rant

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, August 22, 2017 15:14:33 Jonathan Shamir via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> https://dlang.org/htod.html
>
> I click download and get an exe!
>
> And in the bugs section:
> No linux version.
>
> I'll start with the productive part. If anyone can point me out
> to the sources of htod I would love to compile for linux + osx.
> Any task seems more attractive to me than manually converting a
> 1000 line header to D.

>From what I recall, it works pretty poorly anyway. As unpleasant as it may
seem, the only way that I'd really consider converting a C header file would
be by hand. If you want an automated solution though, dstep is probably the
better way to go.

http://code.dlang.org/packages/dstep

I'm not sure tha anyone has touched htod in years. dstep certainly will have
issues (as will any automated solution), but I believe that it's better
maintained and would expect it to do a better job.

> The DUB package repository is horrible! More often than not, the
> packages are so poorly written I end up just writing my own
> implementation.

Well, that depends entirely on the individual package maintainers. At least
there's actually a place to go find such projects now. It used to be that
there really wasn't a good place to go find any D libraries, and there
weren't very many around. So, while the situation may not be ideal and could
certainly use some improvement, it has improved considerably in recent
years.

> Adding the ability to "rate" packages would go a
> long way in improving the situation.

It's been brought up before, and I expect that it will happen at some point.
But it's the kind of thing that not many folks want to work on, so it's
likely to suffer. It's probably the sort of thing where it would make sense
for the dlang foundation to pay someone to do that now that they're able to
do that at least occassionally. Someone would probably still have to show
interest in doing the work though.

> I understand hacking the frontend is way more interesting to most
> of the community. But if we don't find the time to improve on our
> visibility and language maturity, D will never get the attention
> it deserves.

Honestly, I think that the library gets more attention than the compiler.
But in general, what gets done is what the person doing the work wants done
regardless of whether that's the best thing to be doing for the community as
a whole, and that's often how it goes with open source projects. Certainly,
if you're looking for large additions to the standard library, that requires
quite a big commitment in terms of time and effort to get it through the
Phobos review process, and it seems that most folks these days simply don't
want to do that. They'd rather just put their code up on code.dlang.org. A
lot of small stuff does get done to Phobos all the time though. And if you
compare what D's standard library has to what C++'s standard library has, D
really doesn't look that bad. It has a lot of stuff that C++ doesn't. But
there are some areas that C++ does better that we need to improve upon (e.g.
containers - though supposedly Andrei and/or is supervising one of his
students on them; they'd made some progress that they talked about at the
last dconf, but whatever they're up to hasn't matured enough to make it into
Phobos yet).

If you're looking to have the amount of stuff that a language like Java or
C# has in their standard libraries though, I think that you're forever going
to be disappointed. There simply isn't enough manpower for that to happen,
and it would likely require folks being paid fulltime to work on a lot of
it, and that certainly isn't happening. Almost all of what gets done for the
compiler and standard libraries is what folks are doing in their free time.

- Jonathan M Davis