On Sunday, 1 February 2015 at 06:37:27 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/31/2015 9:21 PM, Mike wrote:
Is D's core team genuinely interested in this domain?
Yes.
If you are genuinely interested, are you committed? And if
so, what direction
would you like to take? So far, my ideas have been very
unpopular and I'm
growing weary fighting the current. How can I contribute in a
way that gets us
both where we want to go?
I don't recall what you've suggested in this vein that was very
unpopular - can you please post an example?
The one of major issues is: how to access hardware. We need a
language feature to access hardware registers. This has been
discussed twice. Both time you rejected anything but your own
idea of library functions. You rejected anything anybody said. No
serious programmer will write code that way. It worked in 80's
when we had an uart with three registers 8 bit each. Now an usb
or ethernet peripheral may have 100 registers 32 bit each.
There are workarounds:
- disable optimization. the code works but is 3 times bigger and
slower
- GDC marks shared variables as volatile. This works mostly but
is unstandard and unstable and may be removed at any time.
- Have an separate templated data type which has its own
operators. While this seems to work, it is a little complicated
way to do things.
----
There are some areas that might be developed.
There are not many people here that work with microcontollers
besides Mike and I. Many people make just web services. This is
ok, the business is there. If bare metal is a goal for D then it
is impostant that we processor people do not feel ourselves as
second class people. Our needs and concerns should at least be
noticed and respected by leaders.
More practioal thing is the runtime library. Mike, Adam and some
others have started with empty runtime and added only what they
need. This does not get very far because mamy real D features
need runtime functions. I may the only one to start with full
runtime and remove anything that does not work. I have many D
features working now, like exceptions.
The runtime needs:
- NoSystem should be a supported platform and not a build
failure. The build system should leave out files and features
that are not available.
- Unrelated things should be split in separate files and
unnecessary imports should be removed. Object.d is pulling in
most of the library with its imports. Imports that are used only
in unittests should be in unittest blocks. I know this is worked
on.
- Runtime library functions should not use gc and free all
resources they use. I know this is also being worked on.
The absolute minimum set of changes that I had to make can be
seen here:
https://bitbucket.org/timosi/minlib/src/8674af49718880021c2777d60ac2091bc99c0107/Changes?at=default
These are for GDC 2.065 and some of these may have changed when
GDC 2.066 is out.
In addition, I still need my own build system to select files and
to compile with correct processor options. My skills are not
enough to modify the original build system.
