On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 09:36:53 UTC, Manu wrote:
I'm confused. A couple of posts ago, you seemed to be annoyed
at me for
consistently raising games as a target application space that
was
unrealistic, or not 'down to earth', or some fairly niche and
irrelevant
target workload.
Sorry about that. I have been following D since 2005, on and off,
and kept waiting for the "better C++" to materialize so I can use
it to do fun stuff with it (audio, 3D, raytracing etc).
One hobby of mine is to read Intel/AMD CPU docs, raytracing
papers and compiler stuff, and discussing those aspects and
improving my understanding of those areas is fun. I am loosing
hope in that direction for D, because I don't think D has anyone
with a strong interest in project management that can drive it in
that direction. The responses from the D leads shows signs, not
of a lack of skills, but a lack of interest in project management
"theory" (and unfortunately, that is an area where I know the
theory quite well since I majored in that area).
On the fun side I want what you want. I would love to see you be
the third lead on D, to get a person that "falls to sleep
thinking real time" into that position would make me believe in
the project.
On the "pay for bread" side I am looking at D from the
perspective of having an alternative to Go on the server side. I
guess that has made me "janus-faced" in this discussion. What
would make me tilt in favour of Go instead of D, is that it has
corporate backing and therefore give priority to production level
stability. Even though I like the semantics of D better.
Stability is important to me since I personally pay the price
(literally) for technical flaws since I offer fixed priced
solutions.
Instead of A.A. and W.B. going defensive (and yes it is painful
to see your child get a needle in the foot at the doctor to get
that vaccine that will keep the child healthy in the long term)
they should try to get someone into the team of leads that has an
interest in software development process and software process
improvement. Or at the very least, one person with real time
focus.
(Please note that I found it quite amusing that you claimed that
I was ignorant of long running games, since I studied Anarchy
Online from inception to end in a qualitative manner while trying
to figure out the design properties of the design domain, from a
system development perspective. You don't have to convince me, I
do understand where you are coming from and enjoy reading about
your perspective. ;^)
Video games is a bigger industry than the movie industry.
Casual/phones
have captured a large slice in recent years, but the rest of
the pie is
almost entirely games consoles, which I don't think is a
diminishing
industry so much as the casual/phone space is rather growing
the pie in
overall volume. The industry is expanding as a whole.
Yes, unfortunately the revenue in the mobile app space is very
low for the majority of developers which requires tools that make
them very productive at the cost of technical quality. So lots of
stuff is being done with cheap (and not really performant) tech
to cut down on dev time.
A more performant and productive language could certainly make a
difference, but to get there you need to focus on that niche,
otherwise it will take too many years to catch up with the
alternatives (with their eco system). And the landscape keeps
changing very quickly. Companies that offer 3rd party solutions
fold all the time. So mobile devs are "jaded".
I don't think anyone in the D community really has that power.
If Walter
were to dictate direction that was unpopular enough, the
developer base
would promptly dissolve.
Yes, some would leave, but others would join. Those who today
look at D and say:
- "This is kind of cool, but not quite there yet"
- "when can I expect to see it land in the area where it makes me
productive"
- "is this cart worth pushing, can we actually make a significant
improvement here or do I have to push this cart all by myself"
I would imagine that there are more people sitting on the fence
than not.
What made Linux work out was that they were aiming for a well
defined vision, Unix. Progress was easy to measure.
What made Linux fail on the desktop that they did not have a well
defined vision, so the community spread out on N alternatives and
progress was hard to measure.
This is a bit simplistic, but Open Source projects that does not
have a strongly projected vision tends to wither and dissolve
over time.
the goal. Contributing to D is, in some way, a form of
recreation for contributors.
But you still need a clear vision and well defined goals, because
for every "fun" bit there is 2 "unfun" bits. For every "excellent
feature", you have to axe "2 nice to haves". (kind of)
Are you saying I don't complain enough? :) (at least, last year
before I left)
I would never want to assert authority on the language
direction on behalf
of a single company, like you say, it's a niche target,
although a very big
niche which I think will really benefit from D.
Actually, I think you have the passion to put forth a vision that
could bring D to real time and thus make it a project that is
making "fun" possible.
With no "real time" person on the team I probably will take the
"hobby focus" and enjoy discussing technological possibilites
(such as the discussion we had about ref counting recently).
If that makes A.A. upset. Great. He should be. I am implying that
D needs leadership. He should take leadership. If he does not
want to listen. Well, in that case I am not forcing him to read
what I write. But pointing to github is pointing in the wrong
direction. Github tracks missing bolts and nuts, not a skewed
skeleton.
I just make sure that people never forget that the niche
exists, what the
requirements are, and that tends to result in those targets
being factored
into conversations and designs.
I am perfectly cool with that. If AAA games is the vision. Good.
My prime gripe is the lack of a clearly stated vision. I could go
with any "system level" vision that is not covered by C++/C#.
That's a shame, I see that as one of it's greatest (yet
unrealised) potentials. What are some other reasons anyone
would reach for a native language these days?
Scalable, low resource, servers. Servers that boot up real fast
and handle many connections.
I am currently musing at OSv. It is a kernel written in C++ that
can run on top of KVM. Having something like Go or D on that
platform could be interesting.
Backing caches/databases/web services for low revenue mobile apps.
If it's not an operating system, or some enterprising web
service... what
else commands native hardware access and performance than
embedded
development in a *highly* aggressive and competitive industry?
Again, I don't disagree. *smooch*
;)
