On 1/1/11 6:22 PM, Robert Clipsham wrote:
On 01/01/11 22:53, Ulrik Mikaelsson wrote:
All-in-all, I would rate my D-experience as a 3/5, not unacceptable,
but not reaching it's full potential either.
I'm not sure I could rate my D experience with a single number, I'd
probably have to plot it on an experience/time graph - guess it'd look
somewhat like y=sin(x)+n, where n is just enough to tip me over the edge
onto continued use of D, despite all the annoyances...
I still believe D has a lot of potential though, which is why I'm
sticking with it even when upfront-costs are a bit high. I.E. I'm
currently side-tracked working on developing and documenting a simple
safe Reference-Counting framework that might hopefully be included in
Tango and Druntime, instead of realizing my own ambitions of BitHorde.
I've been using D for a good few years - and I have that same opinion -
it has a lot of potential. In those years I'm yet to have seen that
potential being released though. Wonder what's missing there.
As for realising your own ambitions - I'm finding myself in a similar
situation - the more I try and work on my project, the more I find
myself not working on it as I try and improve the toolchain/work out
bugs. It gets rather stressful at times, guess it introduces some
variation into what I'm doing though. What it does mean is I spend a lot
of time using C++ rather than D though...
Things are definitely improving. For example, I see there's some
reminiscing about Variant. It was the first major Phobos component I
wrote, and I remember when I was done I couldn't believe it the whole
house of cards was standing together; I had to work little miracles
around various compiler bugs.
The language has moved at a breakneck pace until this summer. Clearly
there has been a change of phase since: no major features are being
added and the focus has shifted on consolidating the implementation of
what I believe is a very compelling design. The one thing that dampens
progress on front-end quality is the 64 bit port, which is much slower
than predicted. Even so, the recent releases have fixed an impressive
number of bugs.
We also have a much extended library team. So I have good reasons to
think that things are on a good course.
Andrei
