D on quora ...

[Jerry]

On Wednesday, 11 October 2017 at 07:33:26 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
wrote:
> You know it's not that hard to be the change you wish to see in 
> the world.  That's really the whole point of open source, or at 
> least of at least reasonably or more free software - you're not 
> at the mercy of a paid vendor to whom you pay a fortune for the 
> favour of them closing or otherwise creatively ignoring your 
> tickets.  You can pretty easily fix many problems and 
> irritations yourself, and if you're too busy then one can pay 
> someone to do it, and if one is busy and has no money to spend 
> right now one can try to persuade someone to work on it. But if 
> one just grumbles, probably the result will be just what anyone 
> would expect.

You still are at the mercy of the people maintaining the project. 
Which is kind of no different than being at the mercy of a big 
company from my experience. Some people listen, but a lot of the 
time they don't if something contradicts their views (having to 
do anything regarding Windows in this case). I could fork it and 
then maintain things myself, but that means fixing any pull 
requests or changes in the future yourself. Which now becomes a 
full time job, where as using the project to begin with was the 
point of reducing the workload, not increasing it.


> 64 bit command line build didn't seem to work for a while.  
> That's been fixed recently, as I recall.  One can't really 
> compare Linux and Windows 32 and 64 bit.  Those worlds work 
> very differently.  Windows is as it is because they are 
> fanatical about maintaining backwards compatibility.  So unless 
> you run out of memory then 32 bit compiler isn't much of a 
> restriction.  And if you are doing so much ctfe that you run 
> out of memory, chances are you can figure out how to build the 
> 64 bit compiler on Windows!

You can easily run out of memory, DMD is a memory hog. Yes that's 
exactly the problem I run into all the time. It's not even the 
amount of CTFE you are doing, you can run out of memory by doing 
something really simple. DMD is just horribly optimized in terms 
of memory. Yes more work for me when it's something that should 
be done as part of the build process.

> Try using digger - might work now that the 64 bit command line 
> build works again.  And failing that maybe file a request on 
> bugzilla.

For what... ?

> And I don't know but I guess if you contribute something to the 
> D Foundation, probably - because it's still quite new - it will 
> be easier to get people to listen to a gentle request to have a 
> downloadable 64 bit compiler.  These things do cost money, and 
> right now I think somebody is paying for that out of the 
> goodness of their heart...

Everything costs money. That's how the world works. If you mean 
hosting the source code. Well Github hosts the source for open 
source projects for free. If you mean distributing binaries, well 
Github allows you to upload binary files for people to download 
for free as well. If you mean testing, well there are a lot of 
alternatives that provide free testing for open source projects 
(like appveyor which isn't currently being used). If you mean 
this forum board? Well there are a lot of places you have a board 
for free. There's some 100+ pull requests in DMD alone, just 
trying to contribute something is a chore in itself. Making a 
contribution isn't really worth much.