D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, August 24, 2018 7:46:57 AM MDT Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 13:21:25 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > I think that you're crazy.
>
> No, I just see more potential in D than you do.

To be clear, I'm not calling you crazy in general. I'm calling the idea of
bypassing libc to call syscalls directly under any kind of normal
circumstances crazy. There is tons of work to be done around here to improve
D, and IMHO, reimplementing OS functions just because they're written in C
is a total waste of time and an invitation for bugs - in addition to making
the druntime code that much less portable, since it bypasses the API layer
that was standardized for POSIX systems. It's the kind of thing that's going
to cause us way more work, more bugs, and make us that much less compatible
with existing libraries. And for what? To _maybe_ get slightly better
performance (which you probably won't get)? I honestly think that trying to
bypass libc to talk to the kernel directly is actively worse than just using
libc much as it would be great if we somehow lived in a world where every
library we used was written in D. But the reality of the matter is that
there is a _lot_ out there already written in C where it simply makes no
sense to try to replace it. We're always going to need to interoperate with
C unless we somehow convince all of the C developers to at least switch to
-betterC (which obviously isn't happening).

- Jonathan M Davis