Steve Teale wrote:
Jason House Wrote:
Walter Bright Wrote:
D aims to reduce project costs by reducing training time and
shortening development time.
It really hasn't worked out that way for me with D2. Here's an
example from yesterday:
I picked up where I left off with creating a weak ref library,
something most other GC'd languages have as part of their standard
library. It probably comes as no surprise that I was getting seg
faults. Of course, those are supposed to be trivial to solve. I run
the app through gdb, and catch the crash. I can see the stack but
can't figure out which line the fault occurred on or what the
important local variables are set to.
I make up an incorrect theory of what could be going on and start a
detailed sifting through all actions of the gc. Everything was fine
:( I somehow notice later in the night a small usage difference
between my code and the GC. I fix that and try a better test to
ensure things work.
I see previously working code is now broken. I start checking code
and settle on std.conv being broken. Out of the 15 candidates for
to!(T), I overlook the one that should be used, but do spot what is
incorrectly being used. The code looks legit - do a conversion to a
string from a struct, but only if it lacks a toString function. I
have a to string function! I test the logic with a static assert
and it's wrong. Is this a compiler bug? I remember some screwy is
expression syntax and try that instead. Looks like the screwy
syntax is needed. I have always hated the is syntax because it's
non-intuitive. It looks like Mr. Metaprogramming (Andrei) got it
wrong.
By the way, I put the fixed std.conv yesterday in svn :o).
I tend to agree about the obsessive concern in this newsgroup about
meta-programming. In my view, the whole focus of that is to automate
code generation that really can't be automated if you care about
speed and efficiency because it always has to assume worst case.
Usually, when programmers in a conventional shop do use it, they use
it to generalize a quite narrow case - KISS.
Well I don't know. I agree that to the unwary things could look daunting
at first, but really it all ends up in a much better place than before.
One thing I've always admired about Walter is his willingness and
capacity to learn new things. He once told me something that surprised
me - that he believes many language designers don't get the power of
templates. They would read about templates, work through a couple of
examples, and remain unimpressed. Some languages do seem to suggest
that. It took Walter several passes to actually "get" templates.
Remember, at a time there were no templates in D and Walter said he'll
never put them in, to the joy of some.
When it aims for the wider case, it often ends up being buggy, like
std.stdio.writefln(...) has been from time to time.
There have been quite a few bugs in the I/O functions because the
infrastructure underneath them has gone through a few major revisions.
As Don said, D2 is an alpha and it cannot be held to the stability
standards of a finished product.
Andrei
