GSOC - Holiday Edition

[Mike via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 2 January 2015 at 15:28:58 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:

> Thanks for all the links, and sorry to hear that things haven't 
> gone well.  Do you think it would be worthwhile having a 'Bare 
> Metal D' project for this year, or do you think we would just 
> be wasting the time of some student?

I think, without a few fundamental changes to the language and 
the runtime, bare-metal programming in D will always be playing 
second fiddle to C, and that significantly diminishes its appeal. 
  As I and others have shown, it can be done, but without the 
aforementioned changes, it will always feel hackish and be viewed 
as little more than an interesting experiment. The changes I'm 
thinking of would be very few, but fundamental breaking changes, 
and that doesn't sit well with this community.  Anyone pursuing 
bare-metal programming in D will need to create a slightly 
different dialect of the language if they want it to be a tool 
rather than a toy.

...and perhaps that would be a better GSOC project.  That is, to 
fork the compiler and runtime and try to make it more suitable 
for systems programming, with "systems programming" being defined 
as creating the first layer of hardware abstraction.  
Unfortunately, such a project would probably not be very 
interesting to those who enjoy bare-metal programming, but rather 
more for those that have interest in compilers.  I would not 
market it as bare-metal programming in D, but as creating a 
bare-metal dialect of D.

That's unfortunate, because if D were designed with bare-metal in 
mind from the start, it would scale well to all programming 
disciplines.  But since it was designed more as an efficient 
applications programming language, you have to hammer to fit, 
weld to fill, paint to cover to get it to scale down to 
bare-metal.

Long story short:  Bare-metal programming in the current state of 
D would be a fun and educational experiment, but would not be 
something you could sell seriously to industry.  If fun and 
education is all you're after then go for it. but a bare-metal 
dialect of D is what's really needed for it to be taken seriously.

Mike