Daily downloads in decline

[Rikki Cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 10/06/2015 7:02 p.m., deadalnix wrote:
> On Wednesday, 10 June 2015 at 04:55:43 UTC, Rikki Cattermole wrote:
>>> I think that a lot of the people asking for a 2.067 LDC are just users
>>> of D, and (I am including myself in this group) a lot of those people
>>> don't know the first thing about LLVM or good complier design in
>>> general. While it may seem dishonest for people to ask for these things
>>> and not help, keep in mind that the vast majority of programmers are not
>>> even able to help.
>>
>> I for one would love to help. But I barely understand X86. Not to
>> mention having to get a setup going ext. Not really worth it right now
>> for me.
>>
>> Although I'd rather work on SDC instead of LDC. Primarily because well
>> it's so shinyyyyyy.
>>
>> I would be happy to write a book to teach compiler development from
>> everything from basic x86 encoding to complex optimization strategies.
>> If only I knew it and yes I know they exist just wrong method for
>> teaching it IMO.
>
> Lately, I've been listening to a playlist of interview, presentations
> and other thing involving Elon Musk. The playlist is hours long and I'm
> listening to it while doing other things.
>
> After selling paypal, Musk wanted to use part of his money to revive the
> desire to explore space. What he plan to do is to send a plant on Mars,
> a very symbolic stunt that would, he hopes, renew the interest in space
> exploration, maybe increase NASA funding or whatnot.
>
> Thing is, he doesn't know about space that much. He has a physic major
> working on batteries, and then went to have a payment processing
> company. So he could have said, like you guys, "well I don't know much
> about space/compiler let's wait for others to make things happen". But
> nope, he went to talk to space specialists, engineer and scientists, and
> then, went got in touch with some Russian to buy refurbished ICBM in
> order to start experimenting.
>
> One of the notable thing is how amazed people are that he went to buy
> ICBM from the russian. Well guess what, that is one of the cheapest
> thing that can go into space, so if you want to make something happen,
> that is an excellent starting point.
>
> I can continue the story with myself (because everyone knows I compare
> to Elon in so many ways, and he is greatly inspired by my vision and
> capability to make things happen). Recently I got to a point on SDC
> where working on the GC became an important item. Thing is, I know about
> compiler not memory allocator. Having low level knowledge of how the CPU
> operate does not provide me wisdom about what kind of algorithm and
> datastructure will behave nicely on a typical wokload.
>
> So I went to read tcmalloc source code, jemalloc source code, libc's
> malloc, I read a ton of paper about various allocators, and went after
> Jason Evan - one of the great perk of working for Facebook is to have
> all these amazing people who can make you feel like an idiot because
> they know so much more than you do - as to get as much of the "why" as
> possible. the code told me the "what/how" but that is not sufficient to
> get a good grasp of the matter at hand.
>
> Making things happen is not about waiting for the wisdom to fall from
> the sky to deliver you the deep and arcane knowledge of compiler/memory
> management/rocketry . It is about learning enough to get started, and
> then start do do thing while continuing to learn more.
>
> To get back on point, yes some task in LDC or SDC (or DMD, or GDC)
> require some good knowledge of compiler stuff. Obviously, these are
> compiler, and I'd add D compiler, which involve a certain level of
> complexity. But let's be honest, a good chunk of the work is not guru
> level compiler arcane. Most of the work is actually dumb shit that just
> need to be done like it is for all other software.
>
> You don't wait to know how to paint like Rembrandt to start painting.
> Because that will never happen. You just paint dumb shit again and
> again, trying to make the new shit a bit less shitty than the old shit.
> You do that while studying Rembrandt's techniques. And, after thousand
> of painting, you finally get there.

I'm well aware.
I've been hammering out over long term to learn the underlying technologies.
For example writing a PE-COFF linker.

My experience is well ugh lets just say, if something seems hard and 
almost impossible maybe something isn't quite right.

Unfortunately I'm in a war of attrition trying to learn x86 and friends. 
And its a long one!