Marketing of D - article topic ideas?

[Walter Bright]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 06/03/2010 08:34 PM, Adam Ruppe wrote:
>> I recently rewrote a huge PHP application in D2. It isn't a completely
>> fair comparison, since the PHP was written by, well to be polite, PHP
>> "programmers", but the results were pretty astounding.
>>
>> 90% reduction in lines of code [!], 200% improvement in speed under
>> heavy load (only 50% improvement under light load, still good, but not
>> as good), and the code is actually maintainable! Also, the original
>> took about a year for the first team to write. My D rewrite took 6
>> weeks. Oh yeah, and the PHP is riddled with security holes. Not so
>> much with the D.
>>
>> The best part about the speed is that it is just running as plain old
>> CGI and my code does a lot of inefficient looping through XML. I could
>> probably double the speed again by improving that.
>>
>>
>> I might be able to write this into an article, but what I've done so
>> far is just showed it off to other coders in some private messages on
>> forums. A complication in publically showing it off is it is closed
>> source though. The speed advantage isn't apparent until the code
>> actually does something; PHP is much faster for hello world, but gets
>> spanked when it comes to the actual work.
> 
> I think this is the best way to approach writing, and I strongly 
> encourage you to just plow through whatever IP issues there are and go 
> for it. (In my experience, nobody will come after you for writing an 
> article that doesn't outright give the code away.) I'm repeating myself, 
> but writing a good piece should at best start with a desire to share 
> something you genuinely believe is interesting (as opposed to starting 
> with a desire for developing an article and consequently looking for a 
> topic idea). You seem to be right on the money.

I agree with Andrei - write the article!


> In related news... For what it's worth, I plan to write about 
> memory-isolated containers (those that can use malloc/free for their 
> allocation strategy without being unsafe). I believe there are a number 
> of fine points to be made and that such containers solve an important 
> class of problems. InformIT.com considers the idea interesting and 
> commissioned me to write that article.

This is exactly what I'm talking about.