On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 15:38:40 UTC, Manu wrote:
On 20 April 2012 18:09, SomeDude <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 13:44:55 UTC, Manu wrote:
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but I suspect there
is interest
:)
Maybe if Walter and Andrei were to define some sort of
consortium like
there is for Java, companies would be interested in
participating in the
development ? I have no idea how it would look like though, as
that would
mean a lot more organization and overhead. We clearly don't
work like that
right now.
How does that work in Java's case? It doesn't seem to me that
there is the
manpower here to do that.
Through the Java Community Process (http://jcp.org). Basically,
it's where the proposals for APIs are reviewed. It started after
many people found that the Sun APIs sucked (basically, Sun didn't
have the manpower to follow all the requests of their users) and
founded the Apache and Spring projects to compensate for some
missing parts (the logging API for instance).
Afterwards, key developers of those open source projects became
active part of the JCP, and companies followed.
There is the list of JSR:
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/all
You can see there is quite a lot of people involved in each
specification, a leader and then a review group formed of a
number of experts representing each interested party.
Okay so you're talking about mega-companies who can afford to
invest significant time and money into the language?
Yes.
I think that's very unlikely to happen these days. But it would
still be
nice to be attractive to mid-large sized businesses to get
their hands dirty.
The Oracle-Google trial is interesting, as if Oracle wins, many
companies would be happy not to have to pay huge money to bastard
Ellison just to use the Java API.
If there is an alternative, I think they would be interested.
Right now, the alternative is Microsoft...
The most significant factor here is to see these entities as
customers, and
not necessarily community participants or contributors. Is the
community ready to have those sorts of users?
There is no chance any big company would use D without actively
contributing to its stabilization beforehand, because they can't
afford to have their systems broken every other release.
Their advertising potential may be valuable in bringing other
interest and
contributors into the community, but other than that, what can
those
entities bring to the community that isn't expressed in terms
of manpower?
Well, I think manpower is already a very valuable help, don't you
think ? If some smart people worked all day on the compiler and
libraries, everything would go much faster.
