Poll of the week: main OS and compiler

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, March 02, 2012 01:09:37 Brad Roberts wrote:
> On 3/2/2012 12:25 AM, Manu wrote:
> > But we knew that already, because most of the D devs are linux guys, and D
> > does not present a good experience to Windows users. I can personally
> > point to numerous friends/colleagues who tried out D and turned away
> > within a few hours because the Windows experience was so weak.
> > Windows support should be prioritized BECAUSE Windows numbers are low, not
> > because there's perceived to be no demand on that platform.
> 
> I'm fairly your assertion is incorrect, if by "d devs" you mean the guys
> that are building dmd/druntime/phobos.  I think we actually have more
> contributors that are windows based than linux based.  At a minimum the
> numbers are well balanced, not wildly lopsided towards linux.
> 
> No one has ever claimed that there's no demand for windows support.  What's
> been asserted is that it's easier to support linux/bsd/osx.  And indeed
> that was backed up by how much time was spent on the platform specific
> parts vs the generic parts while implementing 64 bit support.  Windows will
> get 64 bit support at some point.  That's not even a question. What is a
> question is when, and there isn't a good answer for that right now.
> 
> There's a clear need to focus/prioritize limited resources.  It's not a hard
> choice to decide to defer spending many months working on win64 and other
> platform specific support issues when there's still language level issues
> that cross every platform.  That said, as always, if someone wants to
> scratch that itch and contribute to improving the windows specific parts,
> help will be welcomed with open arms and lots of encouragement.

It's definitely a mixture. Don and Walter are primarily Windows users, I 
believe. I think that Kenji is as well. I believe that both Andrei and Sean 
are primarily Mac users. I'm a Linux user. I believe that several others are 
Linux users as well, but I don't remember exactly who uses what platform, and 
many of us use several.

The current state of Windows support has _nothing_ to do with how many Windows 
developers we have. It has everything to do with how hard it is to further 
develop the Windows support - _especially_ when most (all?) of the Windows 
support issues are on the backend.

- Jonathan M Davis