On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 14:35:53 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 14:24:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 07:18:43 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
On Tuesday, 26 January 2016 at 04:57:11 UTC, Joakim wrote:
It is amazing that D has gotten so far as an OSS project
without commercial backing, a credit to the engineering
sense of Walter and the core team. But I don't think you
can organize your way around that fundamental obstacle.
I don't think that is accurate at all.
Which part? There's at least three statements there, one
largely factual, one opinion, then a prediction. It's unclear
what you think is inaccurate, since you don't say.
I don't think OSS needs commercial backing to reach high
technical levels. I do think that many OSS projects spend too
little time on design and process, and well, design and
coordination is more challenging when you aren't co-located in
the same place. I also think that often implementors take
leading roles in OSS, when that role should have been taken by
a designer/coordinator that would spend more time on
leadership. If you spend 10% leading and 90% coding then the
leading part suffers...
OK, I finally know what you disagree with. The fundamental
problem is that without commercial funding, all OSS contributions
are voluntary, usually done during their spare time, while
focused design takes time, a lot of it. Without commercial
backing to fund that time, it is difficult for most to work
towards that high level of technical design. Perhaps that's why
OSS devs spend most of their time coding, they want to focus what
little time they have on getting some code out.
Now, every once in a while, some lone coder like Walter has the
time to buck those odds. But then the problem becomes scaling
the OSS project, especially without a commercial model. We're
lucky that Walter and Andrei are financially independent enough
to work on D full-time, but that's still only two people. D
certainly is going a lot slower than it would with commercial
backing.
Now, corporate support is no panacea, it has its own pitfalls.
And maybe if someone stuck a whole bunch of money behind D,
Walter and Andrei wouldn't even know how to spend all of it well,
ie torrid growth simply may not be possible at this point in the
language growth curve. But I think D would certainly have grown
faster to this point if it had a commercial model, and that such
funding generally allows time for the design and coordination you
say most OSS projects don't do.
But there are tools we can use, if the issue was recognized.
Such as?
I wouldn't say D has pushed the difficult parts, and often
Memory management. Performant garbage collection. Coherent
semantics.
It doesn't sound like Walter has much interest in the first two,
and either nobody has picked those up or bothered to integrate
PRs like Sociomantic's concurrent GC from D1. As for the last,
I'm sure he either disagrees or doesn't care.
implementing takes a lot of work too. Obviously, the design
is usually more important in the long-term, but the design "on
paper" won't matter if nobody wants to implement it.
They probably would if there was consensus behind it, it was
solid, important and had a seal of approval.
I don't think consensus has been the issue as much as time, which
is the killer for any OSS or voluntary project.
