[OT] Re: C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

Abdulhaq alynch4047 at gmail.com
Sat Jul 28 20:34:37 UTC 2018


On Saturday, 28 July 2018 at 19:55:56 UTC, bpr wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 July 2018 at 15:36:43 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
>> I think that I no longer fall into the category of developer 
>> that D is after. D is targeting pedal-to-the-metal 
>> requirements, and I don't need that. TBH I think 99% of 
>> developers don't need it.
>
> I'm 99% sure you just made that number up ;-)
>

Sure, I plucked it out of thin air. But I do think of the 
software development world as an inverted pyramid in terms of 
performance demands and headcount. At the bottom of my inverted 
pyramid I have Linux and Windows. This code needs to be as 
performant as possible and bug free as possible. C/C++/D shine at 
this stuff. However, I number those particular developers in the 
thousands.

Then we have driver writers. Performance is important here but as 
I user I feel that I wish they would concentrate on the 
'bug-free' part a bit more. Especially   those cowboys who 
develop printer and bluetooth drivers. Of course, according to 
them it's the hardware that stinks. These guys and galls number 
in the tens of thousands. Yes I made that up.

Then we have a layer up, Libc developers and co. Then platform 
developers. Unity, Lumberyard for games. Apache.

I think a great bulk of developers, though, sit at the 
application development layer. They are pumping out great swathes 
of Java etc. Users of Spring and dozens of other frameworks. C++ 
is usually the wrong choice for this type of work, but can be 
adopted in a mistaken bid for performance.

Any how many are churning out all that javascript and PHP code?

Hence I think that the number of developers who really need top 
performance is much smaller than the number who don't.

>
> For you, perhaps. I currently work mostly at a pretty low level 
> and I'm pretty sure it's not just self delusion that causes us 
> to use C++ at that low level. Perhaps you've noticed the rise 
> of Rust lately? Are the Mozilla engineers behind it deluded in 
> that they eschew GC and exceptions? I doubt it. I mostly prefer 
> higher level languages with GCs, but nothing in life is free, 
> and GC has significant costs.

If I had to write CFD code, and I'd love to have a crack, then 
I'd really be wanting to use D for its expressiveness and 
performance. But because of the domain that I do work in, I feel 
that I am no longer in D's target demographic.

I remember the subject of write barriers coming up in order (I 
think?) to improve the GC. Around that time Walter said he would 
not change D in any way that would reduce performance by even 1%. 
Hence I feel that D is ruling itself out of the application 
developer market. That's totally cool with me, but it me a long 
time to realise that it was the case and that therefore it was 
less promising to me than it had seemed before.




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