Michael Farnsworth wrote:
I love it when I hear "people don't care about performance anymore,"
because in my experience that couldn't be further from the truth. It
sorta reminds me of the "Apple is dying" argument that crops up every so
often. There will probably always be a market for Apple, and there will
always be a market for performance.
Mmm....performance...
-Mike
Its not that people don't care about performance, companies care more
about rapid development and short time to market. They work like
insurance companies, where if cost of development (ie. coder man hours)
is less then (cost of runtime time) * (code lifetime), then the fewer
coder man hours wins. Its like the cliche that hardware is cheaper the
coders. Also, slow sloppy broken code also means revisions and updates
which in some cases are another avenue of revenue.
Now in the case of movie development, the cost of coding an efficient
rendering system is cheaper then a large rendering farm and/or the money
loss if the movie is released at the wrong time.
Focusing purely on performance is niche, as is focusing purely on syntax
of a language. What matters to the success of a language is how money
can be made off of it.
Do you think PHP would have been so successful if it wasn't such an easy
language which was relatively fast (compared to old CGI scripts), being
released at a time when the web was really starting to take off?
Right now, from my perspective at least, D has the performance and the
syntax, its just the deployment that is sloppy. GDC has a fairly old
DMD front end, the official DMD may or may not work as expected (I'm
talking about the compiler/runtime/standard library integration on this
point).
The battle between compiler/runtime/library is something that I think is
very much needed (the one part of capitalism I actually agree with), but
I think it is definitely something that is blocking D from a wider
acceptance.
