On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 04:06:13 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
On 03/10/2018 05:47 AM, Dylan Graham wrote:
On Saturday, 10 March 2018 at 10:05:49 UTC, rumbu wrote:
According to the State of D Survey, 71% of the respondents
don't care about betterC. Why is betterC on the priority list?
Yeah. Why should D worry about tying itself into C when it
can't even interface with itself through DLLs?
First of all, betterC is about far more than interfacing with
C. In fact, interop with C isn't really what betterC is about
at all - that's a separate aspect of the language. (And those
C/C++ users who still haven't come to D - for many of them the
holdout is *because* of the issues betterC aims to address.
Make no mistake, for all the stockholm syndrome in the C and
C++ worlds, there *are* a lot people openly wanting to jump
ship but don't have a sufficient option yet. Heck, *I'm* a
C/C++ -> D convert.)
But more importantly:
The D language itself is specifically designed and intended to
be multi-purpose. Because of that, D users (and potential D
users) are *highly* diverse. Everybody here has their own
use-cases, their own needs and priorities, and their own list
of things they want fixed yesterday.
In a group this diverse, there just simply *isn't* much on the
D wishlist that's crucially important to a *majority*, because
we all need completely different things.
Personally, better DLL support have little to no impact on me.
Obviously it does for you, and I sympathise. Some of the things
most important to me for D to improve you probably wouldn't
care one bit about - and that's ok. We work on different sorts
of things.
Improved betterC is something I would find very nice if I ever
have time or opportunity to get back into embedded software.
But outside of that, yea, it doesn't impact me much more than
it does for you.
But here's the rub: In this crowd here, probably far more than
most languages, we all have such wildly varying needs that 29%
*is* what qualifies as significant around here. Most wishlist
items are going to have similarly non-majority numbers. And
they have to pick *something* to focus on. Luckily, as the
vision document clearly states, there are *several* such
"somethings" the dlang foundation is committing to working on.
You do have a good point. One of my likes for D was its
flexibility, so it was very hypocritical of me to argue for what
I did.
I regret some of things I said. I'm sorry for any offence caused,
specifically towards members of the DLF.
I wish that DLL support was referenced in the vision document. I
actually like most of what's been said in it, especially the
@safe, @nogc and editor support. I also see Benjamin Thaut (if
you're reading this - awesome work!) making progress on DLL
support, I just wish the foundation could help him out a bit.
