On Tuesday, 10 July 2018 at 18:20:27 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 05:25:11PM +0000, Yuxuan Shui via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
On Friday, 6 July 2018 at 21:15:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[...]
> Of course, for someone looking for an excuse not to use D,
> they will always find another reason why this is not
> sufficient. But that only strengthens the point that the GC
> is just a convenient excuse not to use D.
Not a good excuse to not fix GC, though.
Of course. The current GC, while decent, does leave lots of
room for improvement. Unfortunately, while much talked about,
not many people are willing to actually put in the work to
improve it. So I'm not really interested in generating more
talk, as opposed to action.
> Solve that problem, and they will just move on to the next
> excuse, because the GC is not the real reason; the real
> reason is probably non-technical. Like good ole inertia:
> people are lazy and set in their ways, and resist changing
> what they've grown comfortable with. But actually admitting
> this would make them look bad, so it is easier to find a
> convenient excuse like the GC (or whatever else is different
> from the status quo).
If that's the case, then we are doom. We might just as well
forget about getting popular, and instead spend time making
the language better.
I have always been skeptical of popularity. It is neither a
necessary nor sufficient condition for improved language
quality. That's not to say we should not invest effort in
marketing D... but popularity does not imply technical
superiority, and the only reason I'm here is because of D's
technical superiority.
Like fixing the GC.
Nobody argues *against* fixing the GC. But, who will actually
do it? As opposed to the crowds who are very willing to only
talk about it.
(Although I don't quite agree with you. Some people DO resist
change, that's why some decades old languages are still
popular. But look at the popularity of new languages like Go,
and Rust, and the ever-change landscape of front-end
development. There're tons of people who adapt certain
technology just because it is new, why can't that happen to D?)
[...]
Those who adapt technology merely because it's new, are what I
call the bandwagon jumpers. They will flock to the next brand
new thing, and then just as readily leave in droves once the
novelty has worn off. They are unreliable customers, and I
wouldn't build a business based on their continuing support.
Again, popularity is orthogonal to technical excellence.
T
Except for Crystal, I think that D is superior to many languages
in *ease of use* and *expressivity*, and I really like it a lot
for that.
But for technical aspect like performance, very honestly I'm
still not sure of its technical superiority over similar
languages.
For instance, I'm personally convinced that a Go web server can
often beat its vibe.d equivalent in technical aspects like raw
performance, memory consumption, multi-core usage, etc.
And even if benchmarks are always to be interpreted cautiously,
when several of them lead to exactly the same conclusion as my
own tests, and with such big margins, it's very hard to
completely ignore them.
Just have a look at this one, which is quite famous :
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
I know that many people here will simply tell me that all those
personal et external benchmarks are all wrong, etc.
Maybe you are right.
But in terms of communication, wouldn't it be much more effective
that the D experts of this forum simply fix the open source code
of those benchmarks to make D's technical superiority much more
obvious, so that the decision makers of software development
companies, which stupidly use the informations of such benchmarks
when investigating alternative technologies, can more easily
suggest to their leadership to switch to D ?
