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

bpr brogoff at gmail.com
Sat Jul 28 21:27:12 UTC 2018


On Saturday, 28 July 2018 at 20:34:37 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
> 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.

The developers at Mozilla working on the browser internals, for 
example, are unaccounted for in your analysis. As are the 
developers where I work.

> 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.

I don't know that the great bulk of developers work in Java.

> 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.

I'd be willing to accept that, but I have no idea what the actual 
numbers are.

> 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.

If I had to write CFD code, and I wanted to scratch an itch to 
use a new language,
I'd probably pick Julia, because that community is made up of 
scientific computing
experts. D might be high on my list, but not likely the first 
choice. C++ would be in there too :-(.

>
> 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%.

Here we kind of agree. If D is going to support a GC, I want a 
state of the art precise GC like Go has. That may rule out some D 
features, or incur some cost that
high performance programmers don't like, or even suggest two 
kinds of pointer (a la Modula-3/Nim), which Walter also dislikes.

> Hence I feel that D is ruling itself out of the application 
> developer market.

At this stage in its life, I don't think D should try to be all 
things to all programmers, but rather focus on doing a few things 
way better than the competition.

> 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.

I hear you. You're looking (roughly) for a better Java/Go/Scala, 
and I'm looking for a better C/C++/Rust, at least for what I work 
on now. I don't think D can be both right now, and that the 
language which can satisfy both of us doesn't exist yet, though D 
is close.






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