On Wednesday, 18 January 2012 at 22:15:25 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:57:58 -0800, Walter Bright
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/18/2012 1:27 PM, Patrick Stewart wrote:
How about putting equal effort in keeping existing D users?
There is more
than one blogs online of ex D users with some pretty solid
arguments why they
abandoned D. And those args are usually not some missing
shiny feature X but
feature Y D already has but it is broken.
I do attach far more importance to that than to reasons people
who never used D do not use D.
Just saying focusing on bright future is not excuse to forget
about imperfect
now.
I'm not saying it is.
The point is, we have limited resources. We have to put those
resources where they will have the most effect.
I would argue that what would have the most effect is a
concerted effort to stabilize the compiler. That means
normalizing the differences between DMD/DRT, the Spec, and
TDPL. That means taking a break from anything new (regardless
of how badly we want them ... *COFF*COFF*), doing a thorough
audit of the open issues and prioritizing compiler issues
first. Then dedicated a release or three to doing nothing but
fixing those issues. There are 2719 open issues in the
bugtracker; that number alone will scare off many potential
users. And the number of ICE's is much higher than it really
should be to call DMD stable. In open-source terms, DMD is
beta. I'm leaving out Phobos here specifically because it
doesn't interact with the compiler nearly as much as the
runtime does.
I would also argue that the above point is even more important
in light of the fact that DMD has such limited resources.
Accurate and efficient targeting of those resources is crucial
to D's survival. New features, while exciting, only introduce
the opportunity for new bugs and regressions. But without a
stable compiler a language is just a theory and some
mathematical proofs.
Once we have a stable compiler it gets much easier to build out
libraries of code. These libraries are what really sell the
language as they not only provide a preexisting toolbox for new
developers, but also show that the language is mature enough to
reliably handle complex bodies of code. Also once a stable
compiler exists writing coherent documentation also gets much
easier as the number of undefined and undocumented behaviors is
significantly reduced. Ideally the documentation would have
been written first but at this point I think it is way to much
work for said limited resources to document and code at the
same time.
To be honest, I think this is the end-goal that Andrei is
shooting for in his "Planning Software?" thread...
Can't bypass without saying "+1".
I have been following D development for almost 2 years and most
of the time this is what I was really _dreaming_ about. What
prevents me most from using D other than for small experiments is
not really lack of/unfinished features, but very unclear
development processes. I have been reading newsgroup silently and
attentively for about half a year before got any slightest
understanding of what is really happening.
Just personal feeling, of course.
