On Sunday, 15 January 2012 at 03:31:15 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 1/14/12 9:06 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Saturday, January 14, 2012 20:54:55 Michel Fortin wrote:
Still, Walter perfectly has the right to decide on what he
wants to
work. I understand that he saw implementing SIMD as an
interesting
challenge, and if working on SIMD keeps things interesting
for him,
that can only be great.
Sure. I can understand why the most important thing to work
on might not be
the most interesting thing to work on. And Walter certainly
has the right to
work on whatever he wants to work on.
Exactly and perfectly right. To add to that, with my limited
time, I can hardly afford to work on stuff that isn't fun
(although lately I've done some of it - e.g. I'm not a web
designer). There comes a point, however, when we need to decide
whether our main priority is having fun or making D successful.
I would argue that a happy coder is a productive coder. I'm
personally very please Walter and others are so interested in
SIMD support. Then again, it suites my interests so I admit bias.
2. We haven't identified game designers as a core market, and
one that's more important than e.g. general purpose programmers
who need the like of working qualifiers, multithreading, and
shared libraries.
3. There was never a promise or even a mention that we'll
deliver SIMD. We virtually promise we deliver threads and
expressive qualifiers, and there's still work to do on that.
5. The SIMD work has _zero_ acceleration on existing code; it
only allows experts to write non-portable code that uses SIMD
instructions. Updating to the next release of dmd has zero
SIMD-related benefit to statistically our entire user base.
Walter and I spend hours on the phone discussing strategies and
tactics to make D more successful. And then comes this binge.
Doing anything on SIMD now is a mistake that I am sorry I was
unable to stop. About the only thing that's good about it all
is that it'll be over soon.
Andrei
To put it plainly, I wouldn't really be interested in D if it
wasn't for game design and art applications. C/C++ has been
loosing ground to languages like Java and C# in the
business/server world for years because of painless development,
fancy libraries, and features like Linq. But one area C/C++ still
remain strong is among performance critical code. Given D's
opening message: "Modeling power. Native efficiency." and it's
goal of succeeding C++, I don't see how you can sideline one of
C's most invested parties so easily.
