On 08/10/2014 11:55 pm, "Manu" <turkey...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 08/10/2014 9:20 pm, "Don via Digitalmars-d" < digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote: > > > > On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 19:07:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > >> > >> On 10/6/14, 11:55 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote: > >>> > >>> On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 06:13:41PM +0000, Dicebot via Digitalmars-d wrote: > >>>> > >>>> On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 16:06:04 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > >>> > >>> [...] > >>>>> > >>>>> It would be terrific if Sociomantic would improve its communication > >>>>> with the community about their experience with D and their needs > >>>>> going forward. > >>>> > >>>> > >>>> How about someone starts paying attention to what Don posts? That > >>>> could be an incredible start. I spend great deal of time both reading > >>>> this NG (to be aware of what comes next) and writing (to express both > >>>> personal and Sociomantic concerns) and have literally no idea what can > >>>> be done to make communication more clear. > >>> > >>> > >>> I don't remember who it was, but I'm pretty sure *somebody* at > >>> Sociomantic has stated clearly their request recently: Please break our > >>> code *now*, if it helps to fix language design issues, rather than > >>> later. > >> > >> > >> More particulars would be definitely welcome. I should add that Sociomantic has an interesting position: it's a 100% D shop so interoperability is not a concern for them, and they did their own GC so GC-related improvements are unlikely to make a large difference for them. So "C++ and GC" is likely not to be high priority for them. -- Andrei > > > > > > Exactly. C++ support is of no interest at all, and GC is something we contribute to, rather than something we expect from the community. > > Interestingly we don't even care much about libraries, we've done everything ourselves. > > > > So what do we care about? Mainly, we care about improving the core product. > > > > In general I think that in D we have always suffered from spreading ourselves too thin. We've always had a bunch of cool new features that don't actually work properly. Always, the focus shifts to something else, before the previous feature was finished. > > > > At Sociomantic, we've been successful in our industry using only the features of D1. We're restricted to using D's features from 2007!! Feature-wise, practically nothing from the last seven years has helped us! > > > > With something like C++ support, it's only going to win companies over when it is essentially complete. That means that working on it is a huge investment that doesn't start to pay for itself for a very long time. So although it's a great goal, with a huge potential payoff, I don't think that it should be consuming a whole lot of energy right now. > > > > And personally, I doubt that many companies would use D, even if with perfect C++ interop, if the toolchain stayed at the current level. > > > > As I said in my Dconf 2013 talk -- I advocate a focus on Return On Investment. > > I'd love to see us chasing the easy wins. > > As someone who previously represented a business interest, I couldn't agree more. > Aside from my random frustrated outbursts on a very small set of language issues, the main thing I've been banging on from day 1 is the tooling. Much has improved, but it's still a long way from 'good'. > > Debugging, ldc (for windows), and editor integrations (auto complete, navigation, refactoring tools) are my impersonal (and hopefully non-controversial) short list. They trump everything else I've ever complained about. > The debugging experience is the worst of any language I've used since the 90's, and I would make that top priority. > > C++ might have helped us years ago, but I already solved those issues creatively. Debugging can't be solved without tooling and compiler support.
Just to clarify, I'm all for nogc work; that is very important to us and I appreciate the work, but I support that I wouldn't rate it top priority. C++ is no significant value to me personally, or professionally. Game studios don't use much C++, and like I said, we already worked around those edges. I can't speak for remedy now, but I'm confident that they will *need* ldc working before the game ships. DMD codegen is just not good enough, particularly relating to float; it uses the x87! O_O