CTFE ^^ (pow)

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 00:08:58 UTC 2018


On 18 March 2018 at 17:00, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 March 2018 at 02:19, Johan Engelen via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>> On Sunday, 18 March 2018 at 04:25:48 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>>
>>> What is so hard about implementing a pow intrinsic that CTFE can use?
>>> It's ridiculous that we can't CTFE any non-linear function...
>>> It's one of those blocker bugs that's been there almost 10 years.
>>
>>
>> It's been available in LDC since 1.6.0.
>> https://godbolt.org/g/Yx7PyK
>>
>> - Johan
>>
>> (PS. The aggressive style of your message would not motivate me to improve
>> things for you.)
>
> It's not aggression, it's a decade of compounded frustration.
> I consider myself extremely patient with D, but how far am I supposed
> to extend patience before I admit that I'm wasting my precious time
> investing in something that's never going to 'get there'?
> I still want to love D, but I'm drifting away and using it less and
> less these days, and the main reason is that something so trivial as
> this, which has been a recorded bug for almost a decade and comes up
> often, still never moves. I'm always waiting... and so I find other
> things to do with my time.
>
> After being too busy to work on my side projects for a while, I
> finally had a small block of time. I jumped in, did a few things, then
> hit the same brick wall that I hit 3 years ago. My momentum comes to
> an instant halt, and I feel like I'm just less likely to return to the
> project again in the future wrt competing for priorities.
> Ideally, if I make my blockers known (this one is so simple!!), and
> try and re-awaken them semi-regularly... I'd like to think getting
> back to something 3 years later, I'm able to move forward. But it's
> still most of the same blockers I identified within my first 2-3 days
> of using D ~9 years ago; I still can't ARC, I still can't pass an
> rvalue by ref, and I still can't x^^y in ctfe.
> This one has gotta be by far the simplest thing I've ever complained about!
>
> Anyway, I've pretty much run out of energy to advocate a thing that
> still doesn't even solve my own needs (let along the needs of my
> companies), based on the assumption that it's fast moving, and
> deficiencies will be resolved 'soon enough' after it's made known that
> they are a blocker.
> I'm sorry, 'soon enough' is not soon enough... I've run out of
> patience, and I'm becoming increasingly frustrated and toxic.
>
> I was gonna spend today coding, but I think I'll go outside instead.

I want to just justify my apparent over-reaction... I think I'm not
the only one that feels this way fairly often.
Something that seems trivial only invokes over-reaction of this nature
when there is sufficient emotional energy behind it.
In my case, that is represented by investing a decade of my life into
something based on the promise (**wishful thinking?) that it'll get to
the point where I want it to be as a tool to do my work... but then
slowly awakening myself to the reality that that's actually unlikely
to happen, and the longer it takes, the less likely that eventual
reality becomes.
Perhaps it's breaking a delusion I imposed on myself years ago, but it
still produces a feeling of being robbed of time and energy.

Anyway, I suspect I'm not the only one that reaches this point and
tends to feel this way. I've seen a lot of good people come and go
after they 'burn out' in some way. Patience is finite.
There's no action item here... just wanted to share a reflection, and
perhaps there's some takeaway for the community with respect to
priorities?


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