Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 15 December 2014 at 20:40:29 UTC, evenex wrote:
> This is just my $0.02, not to ask for anything specific, but to 
> add to the cross-section of perspectives on this topic, to whom 
> it may concern:
>
> A colleague and I are writing a framework for building and 
> managing complex simulations and chose to implement in D for 
> the modeling power that the template system brings, which 
> allows us to make an expressive and fairly performant API that 
> is also flexible and easily refactored thanks to static assert 
> and unittest...
>
> But we keep getting hamstrung by bugs; hitting compiler 
> segfaults during template metaprogramming is a very common 
> occurrence, and sometimes UFCS fails. We continue to make 
> progress but lose a lot of time finding workarounds for 
> apparently valid but noncompiling code. We are hoping that with 
> the increased interest in D lately, the implementation will 
> stabilize, but we are nervous about the long-term prospects.
>
> This is a risk we knowingly undertake in exchange for the 
> aforementioned advantages. A lot of cool stuff is possible with 
> D that we can't do in other languages but I constantly work 
> with the fear that we'll stumble upon some compiler bug in 6 
> months time that we can't find a way around. (I originally 
> tried to write this system in C++ and I dread the idea of 
> returning to it.)

I can understand all of the above. I'm in a similar situation. 
Fortunately, I've always been able to find a workaround - so far.

> One of our target use-cases is gaming, and to this end we hope 
> that the difficulty we've had in getting D environments working 
> in Windows will be alleviated soon so that we can confidently 
> target that platform.
>
> As typical college students (I am a senior, partner is recent 
> grad) we can't afford to put up bounties or contract anyone but 
> we put up bug reports when we can (this will be easier when dub 
> dustmite functionality is fully implemented) and can poke 
> around at dmd in gdb in the hopes of getting some useful info 
> to the contributors (I have very little knowledge of compilers, 
> though I have been gleaning details from running dmd in gdb. 
> I'm not yet at the point where I can attempt my own fixes, 
> though I hold out hope that some things will click soon and I 
> can make a more active contribution effort).
>
> We're willing to invest in D, in whatever way we can, and hope 
> to someday (sooner rather than later) add ourselves to the list 
> of D success stories.
>
> But, our success depends on a stable, multi-platform 
> implementation. So we are open to ways on how we might improve 
> D more proactively. Right now we are developing on dmd git head 
> (for the latest fixes) but would like to transition to ldc (for 
> the optimization) as we solidify our design.