Am 19.04.2011 02:40, schrieb jasonw: > bearophile Wrote: > >> Eric Poggel (JoeCoder): >> >>> Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D? It would be very >>> interesting to know. >> >> It seems D at Facebook is becoming a bit like Go at Google :-) >> >> Both firms use several languages (Google uses Python, a quite restricted >> C++, Java, JavaScript, Sawzall, a bit of Go, not-languages as Protocol >> Buffers, etc), both need to process very large amounts of data in reasonable >> time frames, and probably both firms feel the need of a language that's >> almost as fast as C++ (and C) but less bug-prone, simpler and able to lead >> to faster development, and apparently for them Java is not fit enough for >> this purpose (maybe for the Java lack of manual control of memory layout of >> data structures, that leads to higher heap memory usage and less performance >> in some cases). >> >> Bye, >> bearophile > > D isn't tainted by any big "political" organization yet. For example Go is > Google's, JVM stuff is dictated by Oracle, .NET stuff by Microsoft, Obj-C by > Apple. I believe Facebook needs its own language and using D as this kind of > political platform is a way to fight the other giant corporations.
We don't even know yet if D is really used much within Facebook and what it is used for. > > Facebook also needs an incompatible language to improve their vendor lock-in > later in coming markets. For example the rumored Facebook phone. It would be > benefical for them to use some totally incompatible language to prevent code > from leaking to other platforms, most notably Android and iOS. It would be > benefical for D to be used as this kind of weapon because Facebook would pay > the community and Walter a lot. D standard lib would also be incompatible > with C libraries in other systems. I think it's a worthy goal, why should we > pretend otherwise? No successful platform is politically neutral. Thoughts? I totally disagree :) Facebook has Open Sourced a lot of their technology (e.g. Thrift, Hive, HipHop) - so I don't think they're heading for a vendor lock-in with their technology or want "their own" language. Furthermore I don't think a Facebook-phone using a programming language totally incompatible to iOS and Android would succeed. iOS and Android is to big to have totally incompatible competition (for smartphones) - that competition will just fail. As an app-developer you don't want to develop totally seperate versions for each platform. (Right now, especially for games, you can develop most stuff in C and then call that C-Code from Objective-C or Java/Dalvik, as far as I know) I'd love to see the possibility to develop in D for smartphones in general (esp. iOS and Android, maybe Windows Phone if anybody will ever use it), though. But that'd require a port of a compiler and runtime to ARM (and the specific operating systems, of course). I rather think Facebook would use D for internal stuff that needs high performance - stuff that they'd previously would have done in C++. That Andrei wants Thrift bindings for D kind of suggests this ;) It'd be great if Facebook used D and write articles about it. It'd get us a lot attention. However I'm not sure if that is good as long as Phobos is in it's current state - important stuff will be rewritten (streams, XML support), so I don't think D2 is ready for a lot of public attention yet. I'd really hate to see D become a weapon of some corporation. It's really great if corporations use it and support it, but D should stay independent and neutral. In the end, if that corporation goes out of business, D would die as well. Do you think anybody would care about Objective-C without Apple? Or about Java, if it had been limited to Suns products? What about successful languages like C(++) or Python? I think they were and still are pretty neutral (even though at least C and C++ were developed at a commercial company). So no, it's not a worthy goal to become Facebooks (or anybody elses) weapon (and nothing suggests they want that) and I personally would stop using D if something like that happened. (Hope that all makes sense, it's kind of late ;-)) Cheers, - Daniel
