lurker wrote:
I think your post hits the nail directly on the head. People expect commitment and quality these days. Even open source developers expect quality. The competition is huge on compiler market. You have serious competitors like gcc, llvm/clang, ghc, icc, java's jit etc. These have superior performance and dmd has serious problems that make for instance expression templates dead slow in high performance computing.
Expression templates are slow? Do you mean compiling them or executing them? Also, expression templates as I've seen them used in C++ are well supplanted by CTFE in D.
The standard library version of xml parser also sucks,
That's true.
Tango has world class implementation. It's sad to say this, but d2/phobos cannot be used in high performance application development during the next 5 to 10 years. It's also bad for graphical end user applications because the garbage collector is bad and performance wise it cannot win c++ & Qt.
I don't agree with tis.
So what's left? Open source hobby projects. If you're a commercial user, you must be able to buy support.
And you can.
At this pace, even if you shoved tons of dollars to the core developer (yes, there's only one - a huge risk for any 3rd party), nothing will change because D seems to be a hobby project. I don't know why W is writing code and documentation so slowly. I don't know why he doesn't hire more developers (open source developers are free!).
With tons of dollars yes, full time developers could and would be hired.
I can only imagine that he doesn't want anyone to participate, because it's his language and it would be shameful if some random community member could achieve similar results. There are also intellectual property taint issues as we saw with Tango vs Phobos.
At this point, that's an issue for the individual Tango developers to sort out. A number of them have already moved a lot of quality code into Phobos and removed the licensing problem (the binary attribution clause). You mentioned Tango's XML parser - if the developer(s) of that module wish to relicense it and have it put in Phobos, it would be welcome.
