std.math performance (SSE vs. real)

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 4 July 2014 at 12:59:41 UTC, bearophile wrote:
>> If the D maintainers don't care about reaching a stable state, 
>> at the expense of scope and features,
>
> Don't be silly, D devs care a lot about reaching stability, 
> fixing bugs, etc.

But not to the extent that they are willing to limit the scope 
and features to get there in reasonable time for D2 (say 10 
months), so the feature set is expanding and the scope of the 
standard library is too big for a stable mature library that is 
easy to use to be feasible as far as I can tell. Dart is going 
down the same path. It affects adoption, which in turn affects 
the eco system. Basically Dart pushed their commercial adoption 
two years into the future by not commiting to stable platform 
support, claming that they only support "evergreen browsers", 
whatever that means. Which pretty much lets Google, Apple and 
Microsoft define platform stability.

I'm not trying to be pushy or silly. I just want to know if the 
most probable path for an alternative system development language 
is a fork or spinning up a new project.

Evolutionary development is great when there is great uncertainty 
and you need prototyping, but then you need to focus on getting 
to something that is tight, uniform, portable (future proof) and 
feasible with the available resources.

A good starting point would be to get down to locking down the 
specs in a coherent and platform agnostic manner, then plan for 
making a mature toolset to support it. The D spec should be clear 
on what IEEE 754 compliance actually means and relate it to all 
probable scenarios. That would be a very useful exercise in 
decision making.