On Tuesday, 27 October 2015 at 02:21:40 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
In addition, it's mildly demoralising to others to say such things, no matter how good ones intent might be.
My intentions are to call things as they are. If people are demoralized after learning that one person working in his spare time can't match the productivity of several people working full time, then they need a reality check.
You maybe need some increase in contributions
People are perfectly willing to contribute to the front-end of dmd as it's boost licensed and not esoteric. The back-end, as I mentioned before, is really only understood by two or three people. Also, the dmd back-end struggles to be classified as open source and is certainly in no way free software. Those two things don't really inspire many people to sink their teeth into dmd's backend, especially sense all of your work will become copyrighted by a private company after you submit it.
Was Weka not using DMD, for example ? (Maybe I misremember). These things will change over time - look at the spurt of hiring lately, and I am doing my small part too (beginnings are often small).
Companies using dmd are unlikely to influence dmd's codegen in any way. The biggest thing that companies will complain about are compiler and Phobos bugs, as it actively stops them from doing any work.
So I would suggest it isn't productive to think about whether Dmd will catch up. Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter. Making it faster will help many - this defeatist attitude of 'why bother - just use GDC or LDC' may not be the best long-term strategy (remember that these too are volunteer projects, and they don't have an army, especially GDC, and you shouldn't assume that magically they'll always manage just because they have so far), whether or not it catches up.
No one is saying use gdc or ldc, people are saying use gcc or llvm.
There's always an opportunity cost, but so what.
Either you don't understand the concept of opportunity cost or your falling into the sunken costs fallacy.
One should treat dmd performance as an interesting challenge, not something that's set in stone, and can never much change.
goto opportunity_cost;
