D to ASM.js vs D to Dart (VM)

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 03:20:33PM +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> Yep. Look at the open source communities, all the forks and fights.
> There used to be Tango vs Phobos. On the other hand, it's good that
> people can just do their own thing, if they're not happy with an
> existing project (for what ever reason). With companies, you have to
> stick with whatever decision they make, you ain't got no choice there.
> I remember that Apple removed my development tools after an upgrade
> and I had to download them again through the AppStore (had to register
> etc.). That was it for me. Good night! I'm on ArchLinux now. Never
> looked back.

Yeah, the thing with open source is that if you don't like something,
you have the right and the ability to go and change it yourself. With
proprietary software, you're out of luck. The most you can do is to
submit a bug report and pray that they will fix it soon, hopefully in
the next release, which is probably months or perhaps years away.

I remember one time there was a nasty Phobos bug that was a showstopper
for one of my projects. I needed the fix right away, since it was
critical to the project, and judging by the track record of D bugfixes,
it may take months before somebody notices the issue in bugzilla. Well,
no problem, just checkout git HEAD, find the offending code, add a
temporary fix to it. Then I can happily resume my project without
worrying too much, until the "official" fix is merged.  With a
proprietary product, usually you don't even get to *see* their
bugtracker, much less dig into the code and fix it yourself. Your
project gets stuck with imperfect workarounds that only works sometimes,
and you have to uglify your code which becomes a maintenance nightmare
down the road. If Phobos had been a proprietary product, I would've
given up D and moved on to something else.


T

-- 
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.