D is dead

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 23/08/18 17:01, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> If they are blocking 
> your work, complain about them loudly, every day. But not filing them 
> doesn't help anyone.

The economics don't add up.

If a bug is blocking my work, there are two options:
1. I work around it, at which point it is no longer blocking my work 
(grep mecca for DMDBUG)
2. Work actively (in our case, get Johan to do so) until it does not.

Waiting for the community to fix a bug in D that is blocking Weka will 
get Weka kicked out of the market. There is no value proposition. We 
simply have to work faster than that.

The problem is that once I do work around a bug, I no longer have the 
resources to continue complaining about it. I need to move on. My main 
job is to develop for Weka, not develop D itself.

So telling me to keep filing them is simply a non-starter. I've got bugs 
that simply don't reproduce in watered down examples. I will not spend 
two days just to create a test case that demonstrates the bug outside 
the Weka code base. If nothing else, my boss won't allow me to spend 
that time.

Oh, and our code base over 300,000 lines. Don't say "dustmite". It is 
unable to process the code.

> 
> I'm not saying all bugs you file will be fixed, but all bugs you *don't* 
> file will definitely not be fixed.

So far, my experience is that it has about the same chances of being 
fixed both ways, and not filing takes less effort.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine, who kept hoping to win the lottery 
despite never buying a ticket. His reasoning was that the chances of 
winning are not much changed by buying a ticket.

Shachar