[OT] Unity's HPC#

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Friday, 1 March 2019 at 06:54:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
>We could *really* use
> a different format for all this argumentative stuff. Forums are 
> too transient. What we need is something like a Wiki, but 
> organized like this:
>
> - Ideas
>    - Arguments For/Against, and/or possible Cautions
>       - Rebuttals
>          - Counter-Rebuttals
>
> ...For everything, all in one canonical place. Wouldn't that be 
> nice? I get so tired of everyone's arguments about everything 
> having no viewable structure whatsoever...it's no wonder 
> nobody's arguments ever get anywhere!!! This would be so much 
> more practical as a standard base-of-operations for (hopefully) 
> a meritocracy, don't you think?

Nice Idea!

> But NO! We've gotta define a  manual process to soak up as much 
> time as it takes to catch things BEFORE the test suite has a 
> chance to!

Hopefully the DIP process will change significantly at DConf, 
doing the above for it would be a good start!

> This surprises me actually. My perception was that the PS4/XB1 
> were very on-par with each other in terms of architecture: Both 
> are x64-based with PC-like GPUs (and without all the hardware 
> variation within a single platform, like on desktop/laptop). 
> Wouldn't have expected any significant differences regarding a 
> compiler's ability to generate machine code. Or is this more an 
> OS issue than a hardware one? (Or not allowed to say?)

IIRC its system (e.g. linker) related. There was a person trying 
to get LDC to produce code for PS3(? or 4?) and the problem was 
Sony use a patched clang and he couldn't reverse engineer what 
was needed, may have needed LLVM changes.


> I guess that sounds promising at least, y'know, considering. 
> 'Least it's not something fundamental that requires changing 
> any higher-ups minds ;)

Just wait for Dconf ;)

>> People need to care about VisualStudio to nail this checkmark. 
>> The
>> entire industry uses VS, 100's of thousands of native code 
>> developers,
>> there are practically no exceptions.
>> VS is not popular in this forum, but people NEED TO CARE about 
>> it if
>> they want to succeed generally, even if they don't use it 
>> themselves.
>> It's the most important piece of tooling by lightyears.
>
> A good point. I guess at some point D has to decide where its 
> priorities are: Increased adoption of D vs meeting the needs of 
> existing D users, or a more equitable balance of both. Or 
> perhaps D's already made it's decision here...*shudder*...

We just need to make and record decisions period. With the 
discontinuation of the publication of the Vision documents we are 
directionless. Fear not DConf will fix that.

> I honesty find D very frustrating these days. On one hand, it's 
> still by far my favorite language, due to expressiveness, 
> ranges, the low-level abilities it does have (unlike most 
> languages these days), and all of the basic common-sense 
> pragmatism that went into its early design about ten or so 
> years ago. But OTOH, I feel the focus on pragmatism and common 
> sense has been thrown straight out the window for the past many 
> years, and its already accelerating down the same paths that 
> led C++ to become the mess that it is today. I feel like D's 
> obsessively doing *exactly* what Scott Meyers warned us 
> against, in stark contrast to the early principles that made D 
> worthwhile in the first place.

I think Scott was warning us not to make stupid non-sensical 
decisions (hence playing the game "what is the value of this 
variable?"), I think we have a different problem, namely that we 
aren't making enough decisions. Anyway I hope you are coming to 
dconf so we can sort out some of these problems at the Foundation 
AGM there.