Been meaning to respond to this for some time now, finally got
around to it. :)
On Monday, 19 March 2018 at 00:59:45 UTC, Manu wrote:
On 18 March 2018 at 17:28, Joakim via Digitalmars-d
<[email protected]> wrote:
Perhaps the community simply has different priorities than
you? For example, my Android port has never gotten much use
either, which is fine as I primarily did that work for myself.
Nevertheless, you have to think of D as like working in a
startup: if you see something that you think needs doing, you
have to drive it yourself or it will never get done. Pretty
much the same for most any OSS project too.
This is such an easy and readily-deploy-able response here.
What you say is true, and I totally understand this... but at
the same
time, that's not actually the relationship I want to have with
my
tool. A startup probably shouldn't still be a startup 10 years
later.
Then maybe D is the wrong tool for you? Almost any tool that I
know of, you either have to pay a ton of money or be willing to
invest a ton of your development time to maintain yourself. D is
in the latter camp for anything serious, which is why Weka
contracts with the ldc devs and Sociomantic wrote their own
garbage collector and Ocean @nogc libraries.
There are a few exceptions to this rule, ie clang mostly
open-sourced by Apple and available for free, but almost no tools
work that way. You seem to expect D to work like clang without
having an Apple behind it, only the largest company on the
planet! :)
In your case, doing the android work was obviously an interest
you had
on the side, and you gain something from the work itself.
I have a small amount of that, but that's not where I'm at, and
it
never has been. I want to use D to do my job, because I'm fed
up with
C++. I want to engage in D the way I think D should **EXPECT**
it's
users to engage in D; as an end-user, who uses the tool to get
their
jobs done.
Great, you can all pay Walter $100-500 like you do for all your
other tools and then you can get your paying job done. Oh, you
never paid Walter anything? Well, then the expectations are
different.
If D is a large-ish scale hobby project among a bunch of people
with
mutual interests, then that should be more clearly
communicated, but I
don't think that's the intent, and I feel perfectly fine
interacting
with D in the way D is intended to be interacted with.
It has elements of that, but it's growing into something more,
particularly with the fundraising efforts recently. Whether they
will succeed, nobody can predict.
Incidentally, this particular work I'm doing is on a multimedia
library intended for the community... so I really am truly
trying to contribute something of value!! But like most of my
projects, I tend to get blocked at some point, and then it goes
on hold indefinitely.
I know, I'm not saying your ultimate goal is selfish in this
case. However, if you want to use it in your job, that's a
different matter.
On Monday, 19 March 2018 at 01:15:28 UTC, Manu wrote:
On 18 March 2018 at 17:55, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d
<[email protected]> wrote:
I definitely agree with this. If the folks fixing stuff don't
have the same priorities as you, then there's a high risk that
what you want to be fixed won't get fixed, and that's often
how things go with open source projects.
And here it comes again!
I understand the reality, and echo-ing statement sounds so good
to the
community... but it's a terrible opinion to propagate if the
goal is
for D to be successful.
You're effectively saying "D is a hobby/toy, therefore you
can't bank
on it with confidence". If I weren't a deluded zealot, there's
NO WAY
I'd let my business invest in this technology when the crowd
endlessly
repeats this sentiment.
Then don't, but that's the reality of where D's at. There's a
wide spectrum between hobby/toy and production tool that
conservative businesses pay thousands of dollars for, so they can
make sure it's super-stable and supported. D is somewhere in
between, closer to the former than the latter. That means it's
more suited for startups like Sociomantic or Weka and not for
old-school conglomerates like HP. If you want the stability of
the latter while paying nothing, it's your expectations that are
wrong.
So, while it IS a practical reality, there needs to be very
strong
motivation from the community (and organisation) to combat that
practical reality.
I would strongly suggest; never say a sentence like this again.
It's
the wrong attitude, and it gives an undesirable impression to
users.
(assuming the goal is for D to be successful, and not a fun
hobby for
the devs)
It is the _truth_, so it should be repeatedly said.
But at the same time, if you come to D, see all kinds of great
things about it, and think that it's going to be fantastic but
keep running into things that cause you problems when you try
to use D, and then those pain points don't get fixed even
after years of dealing with the language, that's going to be
very frustrating - even more so if you've invested a lot of
time and energy into it.
On some level, the only solution is to buckle down and fix
your pain points yourself, but that can also be quite
frustrating.
Or hire staff who are paid to work on 'boring' issues. I would
make regular donations if I could be satisfied that my decade
old issues would be addressed. I wonder how many others would
too?
There has been a bountysource for many years, linked from the
front page of the wiki: did you ever pick an issue and put a
bounty on it? If not, you have not done what you'd said you'd do.
I don't mean to put all the blame back on you, the community has
failed so far to tie some business model to the OSS development
process, something without which no OSS project has ever gone
anywhere. Whether it's the consulting model that the linux kernel
started off with, or the ad-based model of Firefox/Chrome, or the
hybrid model of Android, every major OSS project you've ever used
in production had a business model powering it behind the scenes.
D has so far failed to have one, which is partially why it's
still a "startup." The recent Opencollective effort is one
possible way to change that. I have suggested another paid model
in this forum before, which is the most successful software
licensing model today.
For you to ever get D in production, outside of startups, one of
these business models will need to be used by the D team.
