Daily downloads in decline

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d]

On 10 June 2015 at 09:02, deadalnix via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> 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.
>
>
+1

The current 'arcane' job being done in my camp is encapulating related
codegen routines under a single umbrella.
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