CTFE ^^ (pow)

[Joakim]

Been meaning to respond to this for some time now, finally got 
around to it. :)

On Monday, 19 March 2018 at 00:59:45 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 18 March 2018 at 17:28, Joakim via Digitalmars-d 
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>>
>> Perhaps the community simply has different priorities than 
>> you? For example, my Android port has never gotten much use 
>> either, which is fine as I primarily did that work for myself.
>>
>> Nevertheless, you have to think of D as like working in a 
>> startup: if you see something that you think needs doing, you 
>> have to drive it yourself or it will never get done. Pretty 
>> much the same for most any OSS project too.
>
> This is such an easy and readily-deploy-able response here.
> What you say is true, and I totally understand this... but at 
> the same
> time, that's not actually the relationship I want to have with 
> my
> tool. A startup probably shouldn't still be a startup 10 years 
> later.

Then maybe D is the wrong tool for you?  Almost any tool that I 
know of, you either have to pay a ton of money or be willing to 
invest a ton of your development time to maintain yourself.  D is 
in the latter camp for anything serious, which is why Weka 
contracts with the ldc devs and Sociomantic wrote their own 
garbage collector and Ocean @nogc libraries.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, ie clang mostly 
open-sourced by Apple and available for free, but almost no tools 
work that way. You seem to expect D to work like clang without 
having an Apple behind it, only the largest company on the 
planet! :)

> In your case, doing the android work was obviously an interest 
> you had
> on the side, and you gain something from the work itself.
> I have a small amount of that, but that's not where I'm at, and 
> it
> never has been. I want to use D to do my job, because I'm fed 
> up with
> C++. I want to engage in D the way I think D should **EXPECT** 
> it's
> users to engage in D; as an end-user, who uses the tool to get 
> their
> jobs done.

Great, you can all pay Walter $100-500 like you do for all your 
other tools and then you can get your paying job done. Oh, you 
never paid Walter anything? Well, then the expectations are 
different.

> If D is a large-ish scale hobby project among a bunch of people 
> with
> mutual interests, then that should be more clearly 
> communicated, but I
> don't think that's the intent, and I feel perfectly fine 
> interacting
> with D in the way D is intended to be interacted with.

It has elements of that, but it's growing into something more, 
particularly with the fundraising efforts recently.  Whether they 
will succeed, nobody can predict.

> Incidentally, this particular work I'm doing is on a multimedia 
> library intended for the community... so I really am truly 
> trying to contribute something of value!! But like most of my 
> projects, I tend to get blocked at some point, and then it goes 
> on hold indefinitely.

I know, I'm not saying your ultimate goal is selfish in this 
case.  However, if you want to use it in your job, that's a 
different matter.

On Monday, 19 March 2018 at 01:15:28 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 18 March 2018 at 17:55, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d 
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> I definitely agree with this. If the folks fixing stuff don't 
>> have the same priorities as you, then there's a high risk that 
>> what you want to be fixed won't get fixed, and that's often 
>> how things go with open source projects.
>
> And here it comes again!
> I understand the reality, and echo-ing statement sounds so good 
> to the
> community... but it's a terrible opinion to propagate if the 
> goal is
> for D to be successful.
> You're effectively saying "D is a hobby/toy, therefore you 
> can't bank
> on it with confidence". If I weren't a deluded zealot, there's 
> NO WAY
> I'd let my business invest in this technology when the crowd 
> endlessly
> repeats this sentiment.

Then don't, but that's the reality of where D's at. There's a 
wide spectrum between hobby/toy and production tool that 
conservative businesses pay thousands of dollars for, so they can 
make sure it's super-stable and supported.  D is somewhere in 
between, closer to the former than the latter.  That means it's 
more suited for startups like Sociomantic or Weka and not for 
old-school conglomerates like HP.  If you want the stability of 
the latter while paying nothing, it's your expectations that are 
wrong.

> So, while it IS a practical reality, there needs to be very 
> strong
> motivation from the community (and organisation) to combat that
> practical reality.
> I would strongly suggest; never say a sentence like this again. 
> It's
> the wrong attitude, and it gives an undesirable impression to 
> users.
> (assuming the goal is for D to be successful, and not a fun 
> hobby for
> the devs)

It is the _truth_, so it should be repeatedly said.

>> But at the same time, if you come to D, see all kinds of great 
>> things about it, and think that it's going to be fantastic but 
>> keep running into things that cause you problems when you try 
>> to use D, and then those pain points don't get fixed even 
>> after years of dealing with the language, that's going to be 
>> very frustrating - even more so if you've invested a lot of 
>> time and energy into it.
>>
>> On some level, the only solution is to buckle down and fix 
>> your pain points yourself, but that can also be quite 
>> frustrating.
>
> Or hire staff who are paid to work on 'boring' issues. I would 
> make regular donations if I could be satisfied that my decade 
> old issues would be addressed. I wonder how many others would 
> too?

There has been a bountysource for many years, linked from the 
front page of the wiki: did you ever pick an issue and put a 
bounty on it?  If not, you have not done what you'd said you'd do.

I don't mean to put all the blame back on you, the community has 
failed so far to tie some business model to the OSS development 
process, something without which no OSS project has ever gone 
anywhere. Whether it's the consulting model that the linux kernel 
started off with, or the ad-based model of Firefox/Chrome, or the 
hybrid model of Android, every major OSS project you've ever used 
in production had a business model powering it behind the scenes.

D has so far failed to have one, which is partially why it's 
still a "startup." The recent Opencollective effort is one 
possible way to change that. I have suggested another paid model 
in this forum before, which is the most successful software 
licensing model today.

For you to ever get D in production, outside of startups, one of 
these business models will need to be used by the D team.