Andrei's Google Talk

[bearophile]

Jeff Nowakowski:
>I keep seeing reports from people running into bugs, unfinished features, and incomplete documentation. There's no end in sight, either, yet a book has been released and the language is promoted as if it were a finished product.<

A software product is "finished" some time after its death. Living languages are unfinished things.

And not all bug reports are born equal. Some of them are minor enhancement requests, other are important enhancement requests that put a patch on some important limit or problem, others are holes in the documentation, others are minor bugs, improvements for error messages or bugs that have some temporary workaround, others are bugs that hit very uncommon situations. Only a very small percentage of the bugs are both bad and very easy to stumble upon, and then there are problems that stop you from using the compiler on some operation system.

Don takes care of keeping an eye on the most important bugs, critical ones or blocking ones, and they slowly get addressed. As time passes and large things are fixed, the less important bugs will be filled, if in the meantime people have shown interest in D. As the D community grows (if D has success) more people will be able to spot bugs, submit patches, and more bugs will be fixed. In that moment Walter will need to delegate more, but the D community is not there yet. D is a C++-class language, it's a large language, and it's made of many parts, so there are probably thousands of bugs left to be fixed, but most of them are not critical :-) So far I have added more than 230 bug reports to Bugzilla, some of them are ugly crashes, etc, but only a small percentage of them are "important", probably less than 20.

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Andrej Mitrovic:
> I only see some 5k views on that video.

5k views in few days is a lot. So there is surely some interest toward D. C++ is slowly becoming a niche language, but it's a large niche still, and it's years that people try to look for something better. But even if no new features are added to D2 for some time, I think it will take something like two more years to have a language+compiler good enough for serious purposes.

Bye,
bearophile