Why do you continue to use D?

[Manu]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 4:10 AM welkam via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 4 June 2020 at 11:59:33 UTC, Manu wrote:
> > It's bizarre and insane that gamedev is populated by zealots
> > that would
> > rather piss away insane amounts of money than to ask the
> > question if
> > there's any better way out there.
>
> Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice shows how inefficient some game
> studios are at making playable content. For 30€ there is a lot of
> game in it. Compared that to other projects where 2 mil copies
> sold at 60€ is below expectation and not financially sustainable.
>
> > Why don't we fix them? Mostly political bullshit... mostly
> > because I need
> > to convince Walter & Andrei what's important without always
> > being able to
> > present concrete cases.
>
> I have seen your proposals and they look like you want to fix
> your problem quickly and with least amount of work. This is good
> approach for game development but bad for language changes. If
> you make a mistake in game no big deal. But if you make a mistake
> in language design you might have to pay for that mistake for
> over a decade. Should I say string auto decoding...
>

'Quickly'? 'Least amount of work'? Pfft... like what?

I've been hammering away for almost 12 years. I've carried lots of missions
that spanned many years.
I was banging on about `scope` (which we finally have) for the entire
duration of dconf 2013, and ceaselessly after that.
I'm not aware of anything I've motivated being a failure or having done
damage to D.

D is riddled with small mistakes. Most of my effort has been related to
fixing them, with varying levels of success.
I certainly have no part in string auto-decoding!

I've spent the last 2 years trying to talk about `shared`, while
**spectacularly huge** opportunities just sail on by. We've made very small
incremental (and broken) progress. The important stuff has been blocked,
and no counter-proposals ever presented. Blizzard is one of the biggest and
most important gamedev houses in the world; imagine if there were some D
code at the heart of all future Blizzard games. What could that bring to D
in terms of interest, resources, manpower, etc. We're a $50 billion company.
My current project would benefit *enormously* from D and various key
colleagues are interested to learn more, but a couple of the key benefits
just have broken implementations (ie, shared), which I can't possibly
demonstrate to my colleagues without a fix... a broken demonstration is a
demonstration of why NOT to use D rather than why we should.
`pragma(inline)` is another one that I just need to work right for our
project but it's broken in an insane way. It's comical, because Walter
added that in ~2011 specifically because I showed that we needed it, but
then the implementation doesn't actually work right (from the day it was
merged), and I haven't been able to use it. It exists because I needed it,
but it never satisfied the one customer that asked for it... and that's a
weirdly common pattern in dlang dev.

It's like, one little thing can ruin the entire case when it's a critical
thing. I can say it's important... but then it's really hard to gather
consensus that it's important. `shared` is broken, I've done what work I
can do alone, but if it's rejected, other people need to step in and make a
counter proposal, or if nobody wants to after 2 years missed opportunity,
then just get out of the way and let me get on with it. I know what we need
to do with shared.

So, I'll refer back to that thing I said above that you responded to; I
don't know how to convince key folks that shared is really important any
more than I am able to say "shared is really important, and this
opportunity depends on it"...?

Back on-topic; I still use D because I just can't stand C++, and I somehow
fundamentally believe D can 'get there'... but god is it a hard and
frustrating road! Eternally so close, but always juuuust misses the mark.
Maybe one day we'll land the shot >_<
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