Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Thursday, 27 December 2018 at 08:25:23 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Thu, 2018-12-27 at 02:13 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] Wow, you've really gone off the deep end now. First you lie that I presented no data, then when called out, start claiming defamation and talk about bringing lawyers into it. You seem to be a beginner at gaslighting. Your initial data was simply two articles expressing an opinion. There was no data about conferences generally just a perception of a failure of conferences in the iOS arena. Good luck with that. :) I will have good luck. The lawyer is a person I have done expert witness work for on libel and email usage in the past in the High Court. I am not a beginner at this sort of thing. You will treat this email as a formal cease and desist letter requiring you stop defaming my character in public written statements. If you continue to defame me in public emails, I will escalate and apply for a cease and desist order in the High Court. Heh, nobody cares about you and your blatant L I E S.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Wednesday, 26 December 2018 at 09:34:48 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Wed, 2018-12-26 at 05:07 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] I wrote. I have never called anyone any name or insult in anything I wrote. I have used a pejorative for a type of argument that was being used, or characterized certain actions negatively. […] I beg to differ. I have the emails with you hurling personal abuse. Your continuous, data free, but combative on others providing no data, hectoring is beginning to annoy people who are trying to be constructive within the D community. You have made your point, that you believe, and no one else here now gives a shit about. I don't know who's going around deleting forum posts, which I'm against normally though in this case concede that our OT squabbling added nothing to this thread, but you missed this post, where he first started lying about what I wrote.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Wednesday, 26 December 2018 at 16:56:17 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Wed, 2018-12-26 at 09:45 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] Wtf are you talking about? I've never emailed you in my life. If you mean in this forum thread, quote what you think is "personal abuse," I see none. We can get to that later, no need for now given your statement below. I see, so you have nothing, as always. […] I have not made my point, since most responding seem to think I'm trying to lessen in-person interaction, like even Walter above with his concert example, when that's the opposite of what I'm saying! I chalk that up to people like you, who lie about my not presenting any data when that's clearly linked in my first post, either because you don't know how to read or choose to lie anyway. So we do not need any history of this thread to see that you have no compunction libelling people. Yes there is free speech, but there is also defamation via the written word which is a civil offence in UK law. This paragraph is almost certainly libellous. I am tempted to take legal advice from a UK libel solicitor of my acquaintance. Wow, you've really gone off the deep end now. First you lie that I presented no data, then when called out, start claiming defamation and talk about bringing lawyers into it. Good luck with that. :) For someome who claims not to give a shit, you certainly keep replying a lot to me and lying about what I wrote. You claimed you were going to stop engaging with me, email on this list 2018- 12-23T0808+00:00, but it seems you are failing to keep your promises. I have stopped engaging with you on the thread topic, DConf, since then, but once you started lying about the tone and content of my posts, I've addressed that.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Wednesday, 26 December 2018 at 09:34:48 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Wed, 2018-12-26 at 05:07 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] I wrote. I have never called anyone any name or insult in anything I wrote. I have used a pejorative for a type of argument that was being used, or characterized certain actions negatively. […] I beg to differ. I have the emails with you hurling personal abuse. Wtf are you talking about? I've never emailed you in my life. If you mean in this forum thread, quote what you think is "personal abuse," I see none. Your continuous, data free, but combative on others providing no data, hectoring is beginning to annoy people who are trying to be constructive within the D community. You have made your point, that you believe, and no one else here now gives a shit about. I have not made my point, since most responding seem to think I'm trying to lessen in-person interaction, like even Walter above with his concert example, when that's the opposite of what I'm saying! I chalk that up to people like you, who lie about my not presenting any data when that's clearly linked in my first post, either because you don't know how to read or choose to lie anyway. For someome who claims not to give a shit, you certainly keep replying a lot to me and lying about what I wrote.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 at 23:09:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 12/25/2018 10:54 AM, Joakim wrote: [...] It's fine that you disagree with others, and it's ok when you insult me, but when you insult others it's time to stop. It's not clear what you're referring to, since you quote nothing I wrote. I have never called anyone any name or insult in anything I wrote. I have used a pejorative for a type of argument that was being used, or characterized certain actions negatively. I stand by those negative descriptions, and if you consider it an "insult" that I said "you just had to be there" is a stupid argument, I don't know what to tell you. Almost anyone who thinks about such matters believes that. I could sit here and say it was "insulting" how people repeatedly characterized me as wanting to stop all in-person interaction, when that is _the exact opposite_ of what I wrote! But I don't go around making up grievances like that, I suggest you don't either.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 at 11:27:29 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote: On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 at 05:01:43 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Monday, 24 December 2018 at 22:22:08 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: The 0.1% of the community that attend seem to like it, the vast majority don't, or at least don't care. You think we have 200k users? More to the point you neglect the benefit of development and progress is shared by all users. I, for one, will not be donating to the foundation as long as they continue to waste money this way, just as others have said they won't donate as long as it doesn't put out a Vision document anymore or otherwise communicate what it's doing with their money. I agree this does need to happen, the foundation will be having a another meeting in Feb to set the vision, which I hope will be a little more planned and productive than the last one. Nobody is asking for your money for this conference (unless you want to attend), and if you feel this way, that's totally your choice. I'm not talking about the registration fee, I'm talking about contributing anything to the foundation, which Walter indicates above covers some of the expenses for DConf. Some additional transparency would help, Mike? I like the results that come from the conferences, I've been to all of them since 2013, on my dime for 3, and with assistance for 3. I felt it was 100% worth it for all. Yet you cannot give a single reason _why_ you felt it was worth it, or why my suggestions wouldn't make it better. I'll give my reasons: I got a job out of it. I got useful insight into various bits of the compiler. I got connections for collaboration with stuff that I'm interested. If you're making a bad decision, it _should_ be questioned. Indeed, but none of us think DConf is a bad idea or that the format doesn't work for us. Almost nothing that has been decided so far would stop most of my three suggestions from still being implemented. You haven't managed to convince us that that would be an improvement. As for how they feel about it, I don't care. The reason most projects and companies fail is because the decision-making process stops being about putting out a good product but about "feelings" and various people "saving face," especially when higher up the hierarchy, ie politics. And don't make up some nonsense that I'm saying that it's okay if everybody starts cursing each other out like Linus did: we're talking about _questioning a decision_. That is the whole point of having a community. The day this community starts being more about saving face is the day I leave it, as that's the beginning of the end, and I don't want to be around for that end. I totally agree, but again, you haven't convinced us that it is an improvement. Not at all, the whole reason I'm willing to debate is that other worthwhile perspectives may be out there. I think the evidence and arguments strongly favor the suggestions I'm putting forward, but I'm perfectly willing to consider other arguments. That is the same stance they should have, but don't appear to. My problem with this "debate" is that nobody was able to defend the current DConf format at all. That reasoning is backwards: in our experience DConf, as done in the past, works, and it works well. The onus is on you to convince us that it would work better the way you describe. Simply repeating over and over again that you're not "convinced" is not an argument, nor do your own personal reasons above argue for one format over another. I asked for a rationale above and got none from Mike and a very weak, confused one from Walter. It's fairly obvious that there was never any real deliberation on the DConf format, and that you guys have dug in and decided to cut off your nose to spite your face. Fine with me, your loss. Consider some of Walter's silly arguments above: at one point he says he wants "successful instantiations of your theories," implying that these are all things I'm just talking about and nobody's doing them, though it's not clear which aspects he thinks that of since I've presented evidence for much of it. But at another point, he says that other D meetups are already doing something I suggest (I pointed out that he's wrong about that one, but let's assume he believes it), so there's no reason for DConf to do it. First of all, 95+% of D meetups appear to follow the DConf format of having a single speaker lecture to a room, so why isn't that an argument against doing that yet again at DConf? What works at one scale doesn't necessarily work at another. I see, so you're arguing that DConf shouldn't be doing in-person talks because it's larger than most D meetups? Don't answer that, scale as a reason makes no sense and there's no way you can make it. To do something very different from a "traditional" conference would be a significant risk when what we have works well. I see no
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 at 07:10:46 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote: On 25/12/2018 6:01 PM, Joakim wrote: See my responses to Nicholas above, I don't think the Android port merits a talk. By the same standards I apply to others' talks above, I don't think my work merits a talk either. ;) A talk covering ARM and Android development in general would be very well received in the context of D. If you want to be convinced we could do a poll on who would want to see it (but I expect quite a large number of people would be in support of). I don't see how it could be worthwhile: nobody has ever given such a DConf talk about a port to a specific platform because it doesn't really make sense. The whole point of a port is to abstract away the platform, so you can simply recompile most of your D source for it, as H. S. Teoh has indicated he's been able to do with the Android app he's been developing in D recently. The way to do that talk is to abstract multiple ports into a general porting guide, which is the talk Kai already gave, or maybe talk about the details of a port to a very obscure or different platform, as Igor did this year: https://dconf.org/2018/talks/cesi.html While it was fascinating to hear how much work he put into it, much more than me, my interest was squelched somewhat because he couldn't reveal the platform and it's likely I would never use it anyway (not a game programmer). I mean, who really develops for non-Windows, non-Posix OS platforms? I haven't since college. For those few who do, maybe the talk was great. But the Android port wasn't that obscure: it's basically a linux/ARM distro with a different libc, Bionic. If you really mean "ARM and Android development in general" and not the details of the port, I can't claim much knowledge of that, as I don't have a large Android codebase that I've developed and deployed. Hopefully, even if I did, there would be nothing to say: as it should be pretty similar to writing D code for a desktop platform. My phone- on whose 5.5" screen I'm viewing the text of this forum response as I type it out on a separate, full-sized bluetooth keyboard paired with it- has 6 GBs of RAM and 128 GBs of storage (of which I have 8 GB free right now). That's about what midrange desktops and laptops come with these days (though with much larger screens ;) ), so you can't say mobile presents much of a constraint in terms of hardware. I've pointed out before that I compile code on my phone about as fast as a Macbook Air from a couple years ago: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/sqbtgmbtrorgthspl...@forum.dlang.org If you see some other angle on an Android talk that I'm missing, I'd be happy to hear it, but I don't see it. Maybe someday when I have a huge, successful Android app in D, I'll write about or put up a talk online about the architecture I used, but hopefully there won't be much specific to Android there. :)
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Monday, 24 December 2018 at 22:22:08 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: On 12/24/18 2:44 AM, Joakim wrote: On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 22:36:05 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: Huh? It's their decision, not yours. Even if the decision has no reason at all, it's still theirs. What is the problem? Start your own D "conference competitor" if you think you can do better. They are accountable to the community, so the decision and its reasons matter. My impression is that the community likes and benefits from these conferences, so everything's cool there. The 0.1% of the community that attend seem to like it, the vast majority don't, or at least don't care. I, for one, will not be donating to the foundation as long as they continue to waste money this way, just as others have said they won't donate as long as it doesn't put out a Vision document anymore or otherwise communicate what it's doing with their money. Nobody is asking for your money for this conference (unless you want to attend), and if you feel this way, that's totally your choice. I'm not talking about the registration fee, I'm talking about contributing anything to the foundation, which Walter indicates above covers some of the expenses for DConf. I like the results that come from the conferences, I've been to all of them since 2013, on my dime for 3, and with assistance for 3. I felt it was 100% worth it for all. Yet you cannot give a single reason _why_ you felt it was worth it, or why my suggestions wouldn't make it better. Nobody cares to debate something that has already been scheduled and planned, the time to bring up concerns was earlier, when you brought it up before. But that failed to convince, now it's decided, time to move on. So you agree with me that there's no point in "debating" it again, perhaps you should have addressed this comment to Mike then? Mike didn't start the debate in this thread, you did. I did no such thing: I asked for the reasons _why_ the decision was made, considering the previous debate. That is not restarting the debate, simply asking for the rationale. Others then tried to debate me again, and while I did respect them enough to engage with their arguments, I repeatedly pointed out that I wasn't looking to debate it again. Consider how one feels when careful deliberation is made, and a final decision, combined with an announcement is made. Would you like to have people question your decisions AFTER they are made, and commitments have already been established? The time to question them is before they are made, not after. Questioning after is simply viewed (rightly) as sour grapes. You didn't get your way, move on. If you're making a bad decision, it _should_ be questioned. Almost nothing that has been decided so far would stop most of my three suggestions from still being implemented. As for how they feel about it, I don't care. The reason most projects and companies fail is because the decision-making process stops being about putting out a good product but about "feelings" and various people "saving face," especially when higher up the hierarchy, ie politics. And don't make up some nonsense that I'm saying that it's okay if everybody starts cursing each other out like Linus did: we're talking about _questioning a decision_. That is the whole point of having a community. The day this community starts being more about saving face is the day I leave it, as that's the beginning of the end, and I don't want to be around for that end. If it's such a great idea, that should be an easy case to make, compared to the alternatives given. Yet all I get is a bunch of stone-walling, suggesting no reasoning was actually involved, just blindly aping others and the past. It is easy, for those who have attended conferences and like them -- they work well. All past dconfs are shining examples. Just drop it and move on to something else. You lost the battle for this one, it's no longer up for discussion. Heh, there was no "battle," as most of those responding didn't even understand what I wrote, like Iain above, gave no arguments (we "like them -- they work well"), and as finally clear from Mike and Walter's responses here, there was no real deliberation on the matter. You think they just flipped a coin one day, and didn't think about any past experience at all? No real thinking must have gone into it because only intelligent people can come to the conclusion you reached, right? This kind of "debate" where the assumption is that only my way is correct is common out there these days, it's tiring. Not at all, the whole reason I'm willing to debate is that other worthwhile perspectives may be out there. I think the evidence and arguments strongly favor the suggestions I'm putting forward, but I'm perfectly willing to consider other arguments. That is the same stance they should have, but don't appear to. My problem
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
about me. I'm pointing out trends for _most_ devs, DConf has been growing in size every year it has been held, as have IWOCL and the LLVM conferences. Has it? I don't see any official numbers, but this year's DConf eye-balled smaller to me on the videos. I'm sure some topics for some conferences are declining, it may well even be an industry wide trend, but I'd bet good money that the new equilibrium will have conferences as a staple. Perhaps, but not with the outdated format D currently follows. my own preferences are irrelevant. I certainly hope not. Of course it is. Just as Walter shouldn't be making decisions based on what he "enjoys," I shouldn't either. Significant attention should be paid to what the majority of the audience wants, which is why it is important to pay attention to data like that which I presented, that shows conference attendance and events significantly declining. But consider that the foundation reimburses speakers and I personally would be very interested to hear what you have been doing with Andoird/ARM and I'm sure many others would as well, the question becomes: is it worth your time? I don't understand what's so special about "speakers" that it couldn't simply reimburse non-speakers that the foundation wants at one of the decentralized locations instead. It seems like the talk is a made-up excuse to pay for some members of the core team to come, when the real reason is to collaborate with them. Why not dispense with that subterfuge? The talks together with the topic of the conference are what draw people to the conference and make it economically viable. It is a perfectly rational decision. If I was running a conference trying to turn a profit I'd probably get more applications for the available speaker slots => better quality speakers => more attendees => $$$. This is a giant assumption, that those blog posts explicitly call out as not holding anymore, now that most of those speakers already get their message out easily online. DCompute would not exist were it not for that reimbursement, as a poor student that made the difference between this is something I can work towards, afford to go to and get good value out of vs not. Perhaps we could run general travel grants like LLVM does but I don't think we're large enough for that, Mike Parker would be the person to talk to about that. But if, like me, they are students and wan't to have something to talk about to aid in networking, then giving a talk will help with that. Then have them do a pre-recorded talk like every other speaker, pick some strong contributors to attend every year as you're already doing, but don't have them talk, and spend all that valuable in-person time actually networking, doing BoF, getting things done. I see little value in a full talk about a port to a new platform like Android, that is basically another linux distro with a different libc. It's not a matter of my time, I don't think it's worth the audience's time. I wish those organizing DConf would focus on that more. You can choose the length of the talk you think would fit the topic. It _might_ make sense for a 5-15 min. lightning talk. You could cover the basics of using the port for developing Android apps Trivial and available on the wiki, no need. the difficulties you experienced doing the port A port is all about fixing a ton of one-off incompatibilities, that is the recipe for a bad talk. It could be used as a launching point for a much larger exploration of the platform itself- say Walter using his DWARF port as a launching point to talk about the DWARF format and such debug formats generally- but I don't know enough about Android to do that, nor would it really make sense at DConf. and the troubles others might have in doing their own, Kai gave an excellent, general version of this talk already, there's nothing substantive I could add to it other than a bit more technical detail of how it applied to my port: https://dconf.org/2016/talks/nacke.html I wish it had been available when I started my port three years earlier! ... as they say, the stage is yours. It would also present an opportunity to convince others of the direction you think we should be going in e.g. w.r.t mobile/ARM/AArch64. I thought about submitting that as a topic last year, but it's better done on the forum, as I've been doing. On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 15:32:41 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On Sun, 23 Dec 2018 at 16:05, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: I'm not sure how a talk is supposed to inspire anything substantive _before_ you've heard it, and pre-recorded talks watched at home would fill the same purpose after. No one is interested in watching pre-recorded talks. Let's look at the numbers. There were around 100 people at DConf this year? Youtube reports 875 views for Andrei's keynote after being recorded and put online
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 10:07:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 12/22/2018 10:20 PM, Joakim wrote: Honestly, yours are routinely the worst presentations at DConf. Your strength as a presenter is when you dig deeply into a bunch of technical detail or present some new technical paradigm, similar to Andrei. Yet, your DConf keynotes usually go the exact opposite route and go very lightly over not very much at all. Eh, I went pretty far into the DIP 1000 material. That one had more technical examples, but I didn't think it was very well-motivated and could probably have had more detail. My feeling is that you save your best stuff for your NWCPP talks and present the baby versions at DConf. 1) Ditch in-person presentations for pre-recorded talks that people watch on their own time. Getting everybody in the same room in London to silently watch talks together is a horrible waste, that only made sense before we all had high-speed internet-connected TVs and smartphones with good cameras. Do a four-day hackathon instead, ie mostly collaboration, not passive viewing. It's very different listening to a presentation live rather than pre-recorded. There are the before and after interactions they inspire. I'm not sure how a talk is supposed to inspire anything substantive _before_ you've heard it, and pre-recorded talks watched at home would fill the same purpose after. Perhaps this is a generation gap, as I see that you and Russel are a couple decades older than me, so let me give my perspective. I've probably watched a week or two of recorded tech talks online over the last year, and maybe a couple hours in person. Invariably, I find myself wishing for a skip-ahead button on those in-person talks, like I have for the online videos. ;) I suspect there are many more like me these days than you two. 2) Rather than doing a central DConf that most cannot justify attending, do several locations, eg in the cities the core team already lives in, like Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Hong Kong, etc. This makes it cost-effective for many more people to attend, and since you'll have ditched the in-person tech talks, spend the time introducing the many more attendees to the language or have those who already know it work on the language/libraries, ie something like the current DConf hackathon. London is the most cost-effective destination for most D team members. For distributed meetings, there have been several D meetups that do what you suggest. While fun and valuable, they're not a replacement for DConf. I have never heard of a meetup doing what I suggest, ie an all-day D event with almost no in-person talks, possibly co-ordinated with other cities. I think this would be _much better_ for D than DConf. 3) Get the core team together as a separate event, either as an offline retreat or online video conference or both. I know you guys need to meet once in awhile, but it makes no sense to spend most of that in-person time at DConf staring at talks that could be viewed online later. If you ever came to one, you might see it differently. I'm not a member of the core team, so I'm not sure how that's relevant. If you just mean that I could observe how the core team is getting a lot of value out of in-person talks, I call BS. While I find it questionable to say that they couldn't easily find and recruit those people online, given that D is primarly an online project where most everything and everyone is easily available online, I see no reason why any of the changes above would stop that. There's a very clear connection between DConf and successful collaborations with industry and D developers. Why mess with success? For the chance of much more success? I'm sure there have been some fruitful collaborations and hiring at DConf. I'm saying there would likely be _even more_ with my suggestions. It seems clear to me that you, at the very least, have not engaged with the links and ideas I've been providing about why the current DConf format is broken. Your opinions would have more weight if (1) you've ever attended a DConf Perhaps but since I haven't been, you could presumably articulate what you find so great about DConf that contradicts my opinions, but you mention nothing here and your reasons elsewhere aren't too worthwhile. and (2) can point to successful instantiations of your theories. What do you consider a "theory" above: that you could have better outreach at several locations or that pre-recorded talks watched at home are a better use of valuable in-person time? I don't think that's theorizing, it's well-accepted by most everyone who knows these subjects. I started off by pointing to documented evidence of conferences going down, and popular bloggers and people who track this stuff talking about how online talks have replaced them, so it is well-known that this trend away from the old conference format is underway. I
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 09:51:58 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote: On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 08:08:59 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 06:54:26 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: Others have cited Rust and Go. I shall cite Python, Ruby, Groovy, Java, Kotlin, Clojure, Haskell, all of which have thriving programming language oriented conferences all over the world. Then there are the Linux conferences, GStreamer conferences, conference all about specific technologies rather than programming languages. And of course there is ACCU. There is much more evidence that the more or less traditional conference format serves a purpose for people, and are remaining very successful. Many of these conferences make good profits, so are commercially viable. That's all well and good, but none of this addresses the key points of whether there are less tech conferences being done and whether they make sense in this day and age. There are still people riding in horse and carriage, that doesn't mean it's still a good idea. :) You say that like some superior technology exists to replace the conference. It does, read the first link I gave in my first post above. Yes, DConf may benefit from tutorials, workshops, BoFs, whatever, but the value it brings to the community is very real. It may bring some value, but that's not the question: the question is whether we could get more value out of the alternatives, particularly at a cheaper cost? The fact that you and others keep avoiding this question suggests you know the answer. Thus I reject the fundamental premise of your position that the conference format is dying off. It isn't. The proof is there. Yes, the proof is there: the conference is dying. Hardly. IME there are two kinds of conferences (or maybe they form a spectrum, whatever) academic and industrial. Academic is going nowhere, research needs presenting, organisation of collaboration needs to happen. Research conferences are irrelevant. I don't pay attention to them and the fact that the Haskell link Atila gave above says their conferences are for presenting research is one big reason why almost nobody uses that PL in industry. Industrial, there is project coordination, employment prospectus, business opportunities, why do you think companies sponsor conferences? They get their moneys worth out of it. Clearly not in the iOS community, and according to a commenter in my second link above, the Javascript community in his country, as the number of tech conferences is going down a lot. It is my impression that this is true across the board for pretty much every tech community, but I presented that iOS link because he actually tallies the evidence. That is a canary in the coal mine for the conference format, that the largest burgeoning dev market on the planet has a dying conference scene. Perhaps you as an individual believe that they are not cost effective for you, fine. As I keep repeating, this is not about me. I'm pointing out trends for _most_ devs, my own preferences are irrelevant. But consider that the foundation reimburses speakers and I personally would be very interested to hear what you have been doing with Andoird/ARM and I'm sure many others would as well, the question becomes: is it worth your time? I don't understand what's so special about "speakers" that it couldn't simply reimburse non-speakers that the foundation wants at one of the decentralized locations instead. It seems like the talk is a made-up excuse to pay for some members of the core team to come, when the real reason is to collaborate with them. Why not dispense with that subterfuge? I see little value in a full talk about a port to a new platform like Android, that is basically another linux distro with a different libc. It's not a matter of my time, I don't think it's worth the audience's time. I wish those organizing DConf would focus on that more.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 09:36:19 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Sun, 2018-12-23 at 08:08 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] This questioning of iOS is so removed from reality that it makes me question if you are qualified to comment on this matter at all. iOS is the largest consumer software platform that is still growing, as it's estimated to bring in twice the revenue of google's Play store (that doesn't count other Android app stores, but they wouldn't make up the gap): Fair enough I have no interest in iOS at all. But you must agree that you are clearly so far removed from the reality of putting on technical conferences generally, that you are not qualified to make assertions such as "conferences are a dead form". You could make various arguments for why they're still having less and less conferences, as my second link above listing them does. But to argue that iOS is not doing well is so ludicrous that it suggests you don't know much about these tech markets. Ludicrous is a good description of the entire situation in this thread. You are making assertions as though they are facts, working on the principle that if you shout long enough and loud enough, people will stop disagreeing. A classic technique. […] Yes, the proof is there: the conference is dying. You simply don't want to admit it. This is just assertions with no data and thus is a religious position. And I know conferences are thriving, you just do not want to admit that. This seems to be a religious issue for you, with your bizzare assertions above, so I'll stop engaging with you now. No it is you that has faith in the death of conferences, I am involved in the reality of conferences being a relevant thing that people want to attend. Just because you do not want to go to conferences doesn't give you the right to try and stop others from doing so. If you are going to stop ranting on this, I think that will make a lot of people very happy. The idea of this email list is to announce things, not debate things. Also on the debating lists the idea is to have a collaborative not combative debate about things. That includes if some people want to do something they should be allowed to do it and not be harangued from the wings. If people want to have a DConf, it is not your position to tell them they cannot. Your statements above are so ridiculous that they refute themselves, no need for me to do so. :) As for your final ridiculous characterization that I'm "ranting/haranguing" people on this matter, I have only ever presented evidence and reasons for why the DConf format doesn't make sense. If that's "ranting" to you, it's clear you don't understand reasoned debate. In this thread, all I've asked is why all those reasons were ignored, as Mike never gave any arguments for why those reasons aren't worth heeding. Walter's response suggests he never read my suggestions or reasons in the first place. Nobody is telling "anyone they cannot," as though any of us have that power. Rather, I'm trying to figure out how this decision was made, in the face of all the reasons given and almost none given for maintaining the status quo.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 06:54:26 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Sat, 2018-12-22 at 13:46 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: […] Given that this conference format is dying off, is there any explanation for why the D team wants to continue this antiquated ritual? https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era http://subfurther.com/blog/2018/01/15/the-final-conf-down/ https://forum.dlang.org/thread/ogrdeyojqzosvjnth...@forum.dlang.org […] So iOS conferences are a dying form. Maybe because iOS is a dying form? This questioning of iOS is so removed from reality that it makes me question if you are qualified to comment on this matter at all. iOS is the largest consumer software platform that is still growing, as it's estimated to bring in twice the revenue of google's Play store (that doesn't count other Android app stores, but they wouldn't make up the gap): https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-nearly-double-that-of-google-play-in-first-half-of-2018/ You could make various arguments for why they're still having less and less conferences, as my second link above listing them does. But to argue that iOS is not doing well is so ludicrous that it suggests you don't know much about these tech markets. Your evidence of the failure of the iOS community to confer is not evidence of the failure of the conference in other communities. I never said they fail to confer, I said they're doing it much less, because the format is not relevant anymore. Others have cited Rust and Go. I shall cite Python, Ruby, Groovy, Java, Kotlin, Clojure, Haskell, all of which have thriving programming language oriented conferences all over the world. Then there are the Linux conferences, GStreamer conferences, conference all about specific technologies rather than programming languages. And of course there is ACCU. There is much more evidence that the more or less traditional conference format serves a purpose for people, and are remaining very successful. Many of these conferences make good profits, so are commercially viable. That's all well and good, but none of this addresses the key points of whether there are less tech conferences being done and whether they make sense in this day and age. There are still people riding in horse and carriage, that doesn't mean it's still a good idea. :) Thus I reject the fundamental premise of your position that the conference format is dying off. It isn't. The proof is there. Yes, the proof is there: the conference is dying. You simply don't want to admit it. This seems to be a religious issue for you, with your bizzare assertions above, so I'll stop engaging with you now.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 22:13:44 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 12/22/2018 6:26 AM, Atila Neves wrote: If you don't like conferences you don't have to go. I for one am excited about being in London in May. Please don't sour it for other who think/feel like I do. That's right. And hefting a pint with Atila is guaranteed to be a highlight of the conference! I recommend it for those who haven't had the pleasure. I'm sure he's fun to be around, the question is whether it's worth the cost of flying to London. That said, I think we've probably tried to cram too many presentations into the schedule. We should probably have fewer and put gaps between them for people to digest and talk about them. The question is if it's worth doing in-person presentations at all. Also, I try to make my presentations less "I lecture and you listen silently" to be much more interactive and engaging with you guys. I suggest others planning a presentation to also think along those lines. Honestly, yours are routinely the worst presentations at DConf. Your strength as a presenter is when you dig deeply into a bunch of technical detail or present some new technical paradigm, similar to Andrei. Yet, your DConf keynotes usually go the exact opposite route and go very lightly over not very much at all. Reading through your listed benefits of DConf below tells me you didn't read anything I wrote in the linked forum thread above from months ago, as nowhere did I say not to get people together in person at all, which is where most of your benefits come from. Rather, I made three primary suggestions for how to get people together instead: 1) Ditch in-person presentations for pre-recorded talks that people watch on their own time. Getting everybody in the same room in London to silently watch talks together is a horrible waste, that only made sense before we all had high-speed internet-connected TVs and smartphones with good cameras. Do a four-day hackathon instead, ie mostly collaboration, not passive viewing. 2) Rather than doing a central DConf that most cannot justify attending, do several locations, eg in the cities the core team already lives in, like Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Hong Kong, etc. This makes it cost-effective for many more people to attend, and since you'll have ditched the in-person tech talks, spend the time introducing the many more attendees to the language or have those who already know it work on the language/libraries, ie something like the current DConf hackathon. 3) Get the core team together as a separate event, either as an offline retreat or online video conference or both. I know you guys need to meet once in awhile, but it makes no sense to spend most of that in-person time at DConf staring at talks that could be viewed online later. Some other advantages of DConf off the top of my head, in no particular order: 1. putting a face and name to the person greatly helps working with people remotely the rest of the year Maybe, but only 2) above mitigates it somewhat, and is it worth the cost? 2. it's amazing how intractable, obstinate online positions just melt away when discussed in person over a beer 1) and 3) enable that more, 2) sacrifices that for greater outreach. 3. it's fun to see what other people are doing, as it's easy to miss what's important by just monitoring the n.g. 1) and 3) enable that more, 2) sacrifices it somewhat. 4. I regard all you folks as my friends, and it's fun to be with y'all Is that more important than outreach and getting things done? 5. many, many collaborations have spawned from meeting like minded individuals at DConf They still would with the suggestions above, just differently. 6. employers come to DConf looking for D developers, and many D developers have gotten jobs from them. If that isn't a win-win, I don't know what is! While I find it questionable to say that they couldn't easily find and recruit those people online, given that D is primarly an online project where most everything and everyone is easily available online, I see no reason why any of the changes above would stop that. It seems clear to me that you, at the very least, have not engaged with the links and ideas I've been providing about why the current DConf format is broken. My fundamental point is that the current DConf conference format is an outdated relic, that made sense decades ago when getting everybody together in a room in Berlin was a fantastic way to get everybody connected. With the ready availability of high-speed internet and video displays to everybody who can afford to pay the registration fee and go to London, that hoary conference format needs to be rethought for the internet age. I have no problem with anybody disagreeing with my suggestions or the reasoning behind them, but I find it flabbergasting for anyone to suggest, as Mike has above, that the old conference format
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 17:36:08 UTC, Bastiaan Veelo wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 16:57:10 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 16:35:27 UTC, Johannes Loher wrote: Also I don't think this is the right place for this discussion. If you feel that we indeed need to rediscuss this issue, I think it should be done in a separate thread. I'm not trying to discuss it with you or the community. I'm asking the D team [...] Then why post in the announce thread? If you don’t feel your previous thread got your message through, you know how to reach the foundation. Why wouldn't I post in here? There's currently a 84-post thread in this Announce forum discussing Atila's blog post about what D got wrong. Similarly, this is the thread where the topic is the next DConf. I almost never send private emails over community matters, which should be discussed publicly. I don’t understand how you can argue against technical conferences so much if you never attended one, much less DConf. I didn't say I never attended one, I probably sat through something back in my college days. I watch some conf videos now and then, but like most techies these days, don't find any value in going. I know the odds are slim, but I hope to meet you there someday. I'd like to meet you too, but I think if it happens, it won't ever be at an outdated format like the current DConf. :P
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 17:13:06 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 16:57:10 UTC, Joakim wrote: I'm not trying to discuss it with you or the community. I'm asking the D team who're making this decision why it's being made, despite all the reasoning in that thread, and reiterating that it's a bad move. I suspect they're not thinking this through, but they can speak for themselves. The decision was made because your reasoning failed to convince anyone involved in the planning that maintaining the current format of DConf is a mistake. Nor do they agree with you that it's a bad move. We like the current format and see no need to change it at this time. I see, so you admit no reasoning was involved on your part? Because you present none, either there or here. If you would like to carry on another debate about this, please open another thread in thhe General forum. This one isn't the place for it. Thanks! As I just noted, I don't care to "debate" it with people who make no arguments. Instead, I'm asking you or whoever made this horrible decision why it's being made. If it's such a great idea, that should be an easy case to make, compared to the alternatives given. Yet all I get is a bunch of stone-walling, suggesting no reasoning was actually involved, just blindly aping others and the past.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 16:35:27 UTC, Johannes Loher wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 15:11:10 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 14:26:29 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 13:46:39 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 12:18:25 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: The egregious waste of time and resources of this DConf format strongly signals that D is not a serious effort to build a used language, It's the same signal being emitted by all of these "failures" as well: Go: https://twitter.com/dgryski/status/1034939523736600576 Rust: https://rustconf.com/ Clojure: https://clojure.org/community/events Haskell: https://wiki.haskell.org/Conferences C++: https://cppcon.org/ https://cpponsea.uk/ http://cppnow.org/ https://meetingcpp.com/ etc. To me it's obvious from that short list that took me less than 5min to come up with that conferences aren't a dying format. I gave up on C++ conferences after the 4th link, there are just too many. The fact that a short list of conferences still exists at all somehow makes it "obvious" to you that they're not dying? Did you even look at my second link that actually tallies some numbers for a particular tech market? It is true that a few conferences are still being done, even my second link above never said they're _all_ gone. But simply saying some are still following this outdated ritual is not an argument for continuing it, nor does it contradict anything I said about the number of conferences going down. If you don't like conferences you don't have to go. This has nothing do me: I've never been to DConf or most any other tech conference and likely never will. This is about whether the D team should be wasting time with this dying format. I for one am excited about being in London in May. Please don't sour it for other who think/feel like I do. Heh, so that's your two big arguments for why the conference format should continue: other languages are doing it and you want to visit London in May? You are exemplifying the mindset that I'm pointing out with these flimsy arguments, everything that is wrong with D and DConf. We talked a great deal about this in your thread (https://forum.dlang.org/thread/ogrdeyojqzosvjnth...@forum.dlang.org). I believe the main takeaway from that discussion was that many of us disagree with your opinion to at least some degree. As I recall, you largely agreed with me: "I totally agree with you on your first point, i.e. making DConf more interactive." "I disagree with your second point, i.e. decentralising DConf... On the other hand, I have to admit that decentralising the event would open it up for a much bigger audience, which definitely is a good idea." https://forum.dlang.org/post/omsxuayxkaqbxeobe...@forum.dlang.org I know that you are very convinced about your idea of how we should do DConf being superior and that is OK. Maybe you are just ahead of time in this case, I don't know. But it is also a fact that many people stated that they actually enjoy the current DConf format very much and believe it is not a waste of time and money at all. So to me, it is no surprise at all that it was decided to to stick with the current format. I really don't care how many people agree or disagree. All I care about is the reasoning presented. As I see it, I gave lots of good reasons, and like Atila here, they gave none: only "I enjoyed myself." That's not a worthwhile reason, if the goal is to further the D language and community. Also I don't think this is the right place for this discussion. If you feel that we indeed need to rediscuss this issue, I think it should be done in a separate thread. I'm not trying to discuss it with you or the community. I'm asking the D team who're making this decision why it's being made, despite all the reasoning in that thread, and reiterating that it's a bad move. I suspect they're not thinking this through, but they can speak for themselves.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 14:26:29 UTC, Atila Neves wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 13:46:39 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 12:18:25 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: The egregious waste of time and resources of this DConf format strongly signals that D is not a serious effort to build a used language, It's the same signal being emitted by all of these "failures" as well: Go: https://twitter.com/dgryski/status/1034939523736600576 Rust: https://rustconf.com/ Clojure: https://clojure.org/community/events Haskell: https://wiki.haskell.org/Conferences C++: https://cppcon.org/ https://cpponsea.uk/ http://cppnow.org/ https://meetingcpp.com/ etc. To me it's obvious from that short list that took me less than 5min to come up with that conferences aren't a dying format. I gave up on C++ conferences after the 4th link, there are just too many. The fact that a short list of conferences still exists at all somehow makes it "obvious" to you that they're not dying? Did you even look at my second link that actually tallies some numbers for a particular tech market? It is true that a few conferences are still being done, even my second link above never said they're _all_ gone. But simply saying some are still following this outdated ritual is not an argument for continuing it, nor does it contradict anything I said about the number of conferences going down. If you don't like conferences you don't have to go. This has nothing do me: I've never been to DConf or most any other tech conference and likely never will. This is about whether the D team should be wasting time with this dying format. I for one am excited about being in London in May. Please don't sour it for other who think/feel like I do. Heh, so that's your two big arguments for why the conference format should continue: other languages are doing it and you want to visit London in May? You are exemplifying the mindset that I'm pointing out with these flimsy arguments, everything that is wrong with D and DConf.
Re: DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 12:18:25 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Thanks to Symmetry Investments, DConf is heading to London! We're still ironing out the details, but I've been sitting on this for weeks and, now that we have a venue, I just can't keep quiet about it any longer. I've updated the DConf site and published a blog post, but I ask that you please don't share this to reddit just yet. I want to wait until after Christmas to share it there. We're still ironing out some details (deadlines, prices, hotels) and I'll update the DConf site in the coming days with info as I get it. Happy Holidays! http://dconf.org/2019/index.html https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/22/dconf-2019-shepherds-pie-edition/ Given that this conference format is dying off, is there any explanation for why the D team wants to continue this antiquated ritual? https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era http://subfurther.com/blog/2018/01/15/the-final-conf-down/ https://forum.dlang.org/thread/ogrdeyojqzosvjnth...@forum.dlang.org It costs $3k to hire a pull request manager, something D desperately needed, yet here you are having the average conference participant spend that mostly on flights and hotels to go to London, only to stare silently at presentations most of the time, while surrounded by a room full of people. What are the possible priorities that this can be considered a good idea? The egregious waste of time and resources of this DConf format strongly signals that D is not a serious effort to build a used language, but a hobby project by two tech retirees, W, who just want to prototype some different ideas, show it off to a bunch of fellow hobbyists, and then have some beers and go sight-seeing. If this is the core team's goal, please just stop stating otherwise and broadcast this on the front page of the website, as you're essentially doing by the way this blog post was written. Giant companies like google or Microsoft can afford these antiquated, giant wastes of time known as conferences and even they are cutting back. The fact that the D team is moving forward with this given how tech is moving is a horrible sign, suggesting it is completely out of touch and unable to prioritize well.
Re: LDC 1.13.0
On Sunday, 16 December 2018 at 15:57:25 UTC, kinke wrote: Glad to announce LDC 1.13: * Based on D 2.083.1. * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore. * Substantial debug info improvements. * New command-line option `-fvisibility=hidden` to hide functions/globals not marked as export, to reduce the size of shared libraries. Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0 New Wiki page highlighting cross-compilation: https://wiki.dlang.org/Cross-compiling_with_LDC Thanks to all contributors! Native Android packages for the Termux app have been updated, including an Android/x64 package for the first time (with the std.variant issue from the last beta now fixed). While no Android device uses x64, many x64 and AArch64 Chromebooks support installing Android apps like Termux, so if you have a Chromebook, you can now start writing and compiling D code on there too: :) https://medium.com/@clumsycontraria/learning-to-code-on-a-bone-stock-chromebook-a7d0e75303bb An Alpine build of ldc for Docker containers and microservices is also up now.
Re: Liran Zvibel of WekaIO on using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 19:59:46 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 09:04:49 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: #4 on HackerNews front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/ 33 points at the moment! Now one of the top-voted links on the front page of HN. I'd just like to point out that Andrei put Liran and I together to do this interview in summer '17- though I had emailed Liran about doing one in '15 and never got a response- and he finally got some time to respond this summer. Now I just need Andrei to finally do an interview, which he's been putting off for even longer. :) Got to fifth highest-voted link all-time from dlang.org on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity=false=0=all=story=false=dlang.org
Re: I've just released Vasaro
On Thursday, 6 December 2018 at 20:45:07 UTC, Andrea Fontana wrote: Hi! I've just released the first version of vasaro. It's a simple program I wrote to create 3d printable vases. It's written in D (of course). It uses derelict-gl, derelict-sdl and gtkd. It should work on linux, macOS and Windows. A special thanks to Adam Ruppe and his SimpleDisplay library I used on earlier versions :) A demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkYo8WCW9jM On reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/a3qykj/ive_just_released_vasaro_the_easytouse_software/ On github: https://github.com/trikko/vasaro/ Feel free to test it! Andrea Nice, when does the version with genetic algorithms come out? ;) https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2015/09/03/wonderful-widgets JK, of course, demo looks good.
Re: Liran Zvibel of WekaIO on using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 09:04:49 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: #4 on HackerNews front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/ 33 points at the moment! Now one of the top-voted links on the front page of HN. I'd just like to point out that Andrei put Liran and I together to do this interview in summer '17- though I had emailed Liran about doing one in '15 and never got a response- and he finally got some time to respond this summer. Now I just need Andrei to finally do an interview, which he's been putting off for even longer. :)
D is in GCC 9 proggit thread
For those who missed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a30hg9/gcc_9_adds_frontend_support_for_the_d_programming/
Re: Interview with Liran Zvibel of WekaIO
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 13:30:21 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote: On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: [...] Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of the official compilers? If not, why? All three compilers listed on the official download page use the same frontend, written in D: https://dlang.org/download The LDC and GDC teams take that DMD frontend and attach it to the LLVM and GCC code-generation backends. As for Weka's tweaks, github shows these different commits from their last 1.11 release to the official tag: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-2.071 Sorry, I compared the wrong Weka branch. Here's the right tag, shows fewer commits different: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-v1.11
Re: Interview with Liran Zvibel of WekaIO
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 08:02:21 UTC, M.M. wrote: On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate! Blog: https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/ Interesting read. I am new to dlang, and after reading the post, I asked myself: the company liked the language, but tweaked the compiler. Could the company now switch to one of the official compilers? If not, why? All three compilers listed on the official download page use the same frontend, written in D: https://dlang.org/download The LDC and GDC teams take that DMD frontend and attach it to the LLVM and GCC code-generation backends. As for Weka's tweaks, github shows these different commits from their last 1.11 release to the official tag: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/compare/v1.11.0...weka-io:weka-2.071 I get the sense that's mostly patches backported from newer LDC releases, as they understandably go slower than official LDC for stability, and some git cruft from maintaining their own branch. Their tweaks don't appear to be substantial on a skim, which makes sense since Johan is a committer on the LDC team. Since LDC is an OSS project, they're free to tweak it for their own use and use it as they like. Johan has done much work for them which they've contributed back upstream to LDC. See Johan's blog posts for more info: http://johanengelen.github.io
Re: Liran Zvibel of WekaIO on using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 09:04:49 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: #4 on HackerNews front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/ 33 points at the moment! It's on lobste.rs now too: https://lobste.rs/t/d Thanks, Atila!
Re: Liran Zvibel of WekaIO on using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 09:04:49 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: #4 on HackerNews front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/ 33 points at the moment! Fantastic, I want to get more commercial uses like this highlighted on the blog- started another interview now with a financial/ML firm using D- so nobody can say D isn't being used. BTW, the top HN comment asks for more detail: tell him to click on the DConf links in the post for Liran's slides and videos. There's a surfeit of tech detail there, this is just an overview to get people started on learning more.
Re: Interview with Liran Zvibel of WekaIO
On Wednesday, 5 December 2018 at 06:50:13 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 17:15:44 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Great to see this finally up! I agree with the only proggit comment though: the title is not descriptive enough for reddit/HN, as I doubt most have heard of Liran or Weka. It's on HN now under a better title. Thanks, let's see if it does any better. I asked Atila to submit it to lobste.rs too, his mutex post did well on there last month: https://lobste.rs/t/d
Re: Interview with Liran Zvibel of WekaIO
On Tuesday, 4 December 2018 at 14:21:02 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Joakim interviewed Liran for the D Blog about their file system, Matrix, and their use of D. Thanks to Joakim for putting it together, and to Liran for taking the time to participate! Blog: https://dlang.org/blog/2018/12/04/interview-liran-zvibel-of-wekaio/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a3106x/interview_liran_zvibel_of_wekaio/ Great to see this finally up! I agree with the only proggit comment though: the title is not descriptive enough for reddit/HN, as I doubt most have heard of Liran or Weka.
Re: LDC 1.13.0-beta2
On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 16:54:55 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 16:36:22 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 01:25:53PM +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 10:43:55 UTC, kinke wrote: > Glad to announce the second beta for LDC 1.13: > > * Based on D 2.083.0+ (yesterday's DMD stable). [...] I've added native builds for Android, including Android/x86_64 for the first time. Several tests for std.variant segfault, likely because of the 128-bit real causing x64 codegen issues, but most everything else passes. [...] What's the status of cross-compiling to 64-bit ARM? On the wiki you wrote that it doesn't fully work yet. Does it work with this new release? It's been mostly working since 1.11. That note on the wiki links to this tracker issue that lists the few remaining holes, mostly just extending Phobos support for 80-bit precision out to full 128-bit Quadruple precision in a few spots and finishing off the C/C++ compatibility: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2153 Btw, if you ever want to check the current status of the AArch64 port, all you have to do is look at the logs for the latest run of the ldc AArch64 CI, which kinke setup and is run for every ldc PR, on this dashboard: https://app.shippable.com/github/ldc-developers/ldc/dashboard Clicking on the last job on the master branch, expanding the build_ci output in the log, then doing the same for the stdlib tests, I see only five Phobos modules with failing tests. Three are mentioned in the tracker issue above, while std.complex has a single assert that trips, because it's a few bits off at 113-bit precision, which is still much more accurate than the 64-bit precision (or less) it's normally run at on x86/x64. Also, a single assert on std.algorithm.sorting trips for the same reason as a handful of tests in std.math: -real.nan at compile-time is output as real.nan by ldc running natively on AArch64, though not when cross-compiling. std.internal.math.gammafunction works fine at 64-bit precision on AArch64, but only a couple of the 100 or so constant reals it uses are at full 113-bit precision, so several tests assert that only allow a couple bits to be off from full real precision. Obviously that only matters if you need full 113-bit precision from that module. kinke recently disabled the tests for core.thread on the CI because they're super-flaky on linux/glibc/AArch64, while I haven't had that problem with Bionic/AArch64. You will see more tests failing if you cross-compile from x64, because of the mismatch between 64-bit precision for compile-time reals and 113-bit precision for runtime reals on AArch64. Also, you can see the 10-12 modules that assert in the dmd compiler testsuite earlier in that log, most because of missing core.stdc.stdarg.va_arg support to call C varargs on AArch64. That's about it: help is appreciated on tightening those last few screws.
Re: D compilation is too slow and I am forking the compiler
On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:42:40 UTC, bachmeier wrote: On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:21:39 UTC, Joakim wrote: I agree that it was a risky title, as many who don't know D will simply see it and go, "Yet another slow compiler, eh, I'll pass" and not click on the link. Whereas others who have heard something of D will be intrigued, as they know it's already supposed to compile fast. And yet more others will click on it purely for the controversy, just to gawk at some technical bickering. I don't actually think it was risky. What are the odds that someone was going to start using D for a major project but then changed her mind upon seeing a title on HN or Reddit? Probably very small that even one person did that. Yes, but you're ignoring the much larger group I mentioned- those who only vaguely heard of D, if at all- and the negative title gives them a reason not to look into it further. And then there is always the fact that there was a story on HN/Reddit about D. It's hard for publicity for a language like D to be bad when so few people use it. The quote that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" comes from art and show business though, don't think it's true for tech and other markets. When your audience is looking for a tool and not entertainment, there's lots of ways for bad publicity to sink it. Anyway, I noted in this case that the provocative title may actually have gotten more people to read a positive post, so the pros likely outweighed the cons. We can just never know how large the unclicked-on downside was: you can never measure how many people heard of but _didn't_ buy your book, because they didn't like the title or something else about its exterior. On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:53:59 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote: On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:21:39 UTC, Joakim wrote: In my opinion language adoption is a seduction/sales process very much like business-to-consumer is, the way I see it it's strikingly similar to marketing B2C apps, unless there will be no "impulse buy". I find that hard to believe: we are talking about a technical tool here. How many times have you been in this conversation: -- - What language are you using? - D. - I know next to nothing about D. - Oh, it's very good, I even built a business on it! list of arguments and features>. - Oh no thanks. I should try Rust, it's secure, fast, modern blah blah; facts don't matter to me. But in reality I won't even learn a new language, I'm happy with a language without multi-threading. -- It happens to me ALL THE TIME. This pattern is so predictable it's becoming boring so now I just keep silent. Never, I don't go around trying to convince people one-on-one to use D. I have given talks to groups introducing the language, that's how I go about it. What happens? Rust / Go have outmarketed us with words. The battle (of marketing) is on words not technical features, Rust happen to own "programming language" + "safety", what do we own? D is good in all kinds of directions and the marketing message is less simple. The leaders choose to own the word "fast" (see our new motto "fast code, fast" which is very accurate) and it's important to get aligned. I'll note that in your example they haven't actually learnt Rust either. I don't think marketing is that relevant for D at this stage, nor for Rust/Go either. The way anything- tech, fashion, TV shows- becomes popular is that some early tastemaker decides that it's worth using or backing. Eventually, enough early adopters find value that it spreads out to the majority, who simply follow their lead. Most people aren't early adopters of most things. They like to think they are, so they'll give you all kinds of rational-sounding reasons for why they don't like some new tech, but the real underlying thought process goes something like this, "I have no idea if this new tech will do well or not. I could take a risk on it but it's safer not to, so I will just wait and see if it gets popular, then follow the herd." Very few will admit this though, hence the list of plausible-sounding reasons that don't actually make sense! ;) As Laeeth always says, you're best off looking for people who're actually capable and empowered to make such risky decisions, rather than aiming for the majority too early, because they only jump on board once the bandwagon is stuffed and rolling downhill. Also, regardless of how languages are chosen as they get into the majority, D is very much still in the innovators/early-adopters stage: But the current state of D would very much accomodate the middle-of-the-curve adopters. The language rarely breaks stuff. People making money with it, making long-term bets. Hell, I could make a laundry list of things that are better in D versus any alternatives! That doesn't bring users. I'm not talking about the quality of
Re: D compilation is too slow and I am forking the compiler
On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:00:36 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote: On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 04:48:09 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote: On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 20:51:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: Unfortunately, you're right. The title will leave the impression "D is slow at compiling". You have to carefully read the article to see otherwise, and few will do that. Sorry about that. I'll have to think of two titles next time, one for the D community and one for everyone else. If it's of any consolation, the top comments in both discussion threads point out that the title is inaccurate on purpose. Please don't get me wrong, it's an excellent article, a provocative title, and fantastic work going on. I didn't meant to hurt! In my opinion language adoption is a seduction/sales process very much like business-to-consumer is, the way I see it it's strikingly similar to marketing B2C apps, unless there will be no "impulse buy". I find that hard to believe: we are talking about a technical tool here. Also, regardless of how languages are chosen as they get into the majority, D is very much still in the innovators/early-adopters stage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle That is a very different type of sales process, much more geared towards what the new tech can actually do. Actually no less than 3 programmer friends came to (I'm the weirdo-using-D and people are _always_ in disbelief and invent all sorts of reasons not to try) saying they saw an article on D on HN, with "D compilation is slow", and on further examination they didn't read or at best the first paragraph. But they did remember the title. They may rationally think their opinion of D hasn't changed: aren't we highly capable people? With people like that, it's almost impossible to get them in the early adopter stage. They will only jump on the bandwagon once it's full, ie as part of the late majority. I'm not making that up! So why is it a problem ? HN may be the only time they hear about D. The words of the title may be their only contact with it. The first 3 words of the title may be the only thing associated with the "D language" chunk in their brain. The associative mind doesn't know _negation_ so even a title like "D compilation wasn't fast so I forked the compiler" is better from a marketing point of view since it contains the word "fast" in it! That's why marketing people have the annoying habit of using positive words, you may think this stuff is unimportant but this is actually the important meat. Reasonable people may think marketing and biases don't apply to them but they do, it works without your consent. I agree that it was a risky title, as many who don't know D will simply see it and go, "Yet another slow compiler, eh, I'll pass" and not click on the link. Whereas others who have heard something of D will be intrigued, as they know it's already supposed to compile fast. And yet more others will click on it purely for the controversy, just to gawk at some technical bickering. Given how well it did on HN/reddit/lobste.rs, I think Vlad's gamble probably paid off. We can't run the counterfactual of choosing a safer title to see if it would have done even better, let's just say it did well enough. ;)
Re: LDC 1.13.0-beta2
On Thursday, 22 November 2018 at 16:36:22 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 01:25:53PM +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 10:43:55 UTC, kinke wrote: > Glad to announce the second beta for LDC 1.13: > > * Based on D 2.083.0+ (yesterday's DMD stable). [...] I've added native builds for Android, including Android/x86_64 for the first time. Several tests for std.variant segfault, likely because of the 128-bit real causing x64 codegen issues, but most everything else passes. [...] What's the status of cross-compiling to 64-bit ARM? On the wiki you wrote that it doesn't fully work yet. Does it work with this new release? It's been mostly working since 1.11. That note on the wiki links to this tracker issue that lists the few remaining holes, mostly just extending Phobos support for 80-bit precision out to full 128-bit Quadruple precision in a few spots and finishing off the C/C++ compatibility: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2153
Re: LDC 1.13.0-beta2
On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 10:43:55 UTC, kinke wrote: Glad to announce the second beta for LDC 1.13: * Based on D 2.083.0+ (yesterday's DMD stable). * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore. * Substantial debug info improvements. * New command-line option `-fvisibility=hidden` to hide functions/globals not marked as export, to reduce the size of shared libraries. Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0-beta2 Thanks to all contributors! I've added native builds for Android, including Android/x86_64 for the first time. Several tests for std.variant segfault, likely because of the 128-bit real causing x64 codegen issues, but most everything else passes. This means that if you have an x86 or x64 Chromebook that supports running Android apps, you can install the Termux app and compile D code on there: https://nosarthur.github.io/coding/2018/01/15/termux.html
Re: DMD backend now in D
On Tuesday, 13 November 2018 at 20:42:00 UTC, Temtaime wrote: On Monday, 12 November 2018 at 02:37:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 11/11/2018 3:58 PM, Mike Franklin wrote: This is a significant milestone. Congratulations, Walter! Many people helped out with this, too. There are still a few .c files in https://github.com/dlang/dmd/tree/master/src/dmd/backend, so what's the significance of those? tk.c fp.c os.c strtold.c tk/mem.c These could be converted too, but are independent from everything else and hardly seem worth the bother. Sebastian has a PR for os.cd. Will there ever be a day when we no longer need a C/C++ compiler to build DMD? Sure. No, as phobos is dependent on C libraries such as a zlib for example. DMD doesn't use Phobos. Also D is dependent on libc. It's possible to reimplement the subset of libc functions that DMD depends on in D.
Re: DIP 1015--Deprecation of Implicit Conversion of Int. & Char. Literals to bool--Formal Assement
On Monday, 12 November 2018 at 17:25:15 UTC, Johannes Loher wrote: On Monday, 12 November 2018 at 16:39:47 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Walter and Andrei take the position that this is incorrect the wrong way to view a bool. Unfortunately you did not include their justification for this position (if any). To me it would be interesting to know about the reasoning that is behind this position. Maybe you didn't read the link to their reasoning in the DIP, but it's quite simple: they view a bool as an integral type with two possible values, a `bit` if you like. As such, they prefer to fit it into the existing scheme for integral types rather than special-casing booleans as Mike proposed.
Re: The New Fundraising Campaign
On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 16:09:12 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: I've just published a new blog post describing our new fundraising campaign. TL;DR: We want to pay a Pull Request Manager to thin out the pull request queues and coordinate between relevant parties on newer pull requests so they don't go stale. We've launched a three-month campaign, and Nicholas Wilson has agreed to do the work. We have high hopes that this will help reduce frustration for current and future contributors. And we will be grateful for your support in making it happen. Please read the blog post for more details: https://dlang.org/blog/2018/11/10/the-new-fundraising-campaign/ For the impatient: https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/NDUwNTY= "Walter and Andrei both" -> both Walter and Andrei "Pull requests were" -> Pull Requests (PRs) were "the list. The one linked above, for example." -> the list, for example, the one linked above. Nice work setting this up, looking forward to many more targeted campaigns like this.
Re: Profiling DMD's Compilation Time with dmdprof
On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 08:29:28 UTC, Manu wrote: On Thu, Nov 8, 2018 at 12:10 AM Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 07:54:56 UTC, Manu wrote: > On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 10:30 PM Vladimir Panteleev via > Digitalmars-d-announce > wrote: >> >> On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 06:08:20 UTC, Vladimir >> Panteleev wrote: >> > It was definitely about 4 seconds not too long ago, a few >> > years at most. >> >> No, it's still 4 seconds. >> >> digger --offline --config-file=/dev/null -j auto -c >> local.cache=none build 7.31s user 1.51s system 203% cpu >> 4.340 total >> >> > It does seem to take more time now; I wonder why. >> >> If it takes longer, then it's probably because it's being >> built in one CPU core, or in the release build. > > https://youtu.be/msWuRlD3zy0 Lol, I saw that link and figured it was either some comedy video, like the Python ones Walter sometimes posts, or you were actually showing us how long it takes. Pretty funny to see the latter. It's not so funny when every one-line tweak burns 2 minutes of my life away. I was laughing that you actually proved your point with direct video evidence, obviously it's sad that it takes so long. > DMD only builds with one core, since it builds altogether. Yes, but your build time is unusually long even with one core. Are the D backend and frontend at least built in parallel to each other? That doesn't matter, you can clearly see the backend built in less than 2 seconds. The C/C++ files in the beginning are built very fast, but the D files in the backend appear to take much longer, kicking in at 1:18 of your video and then the next compilation step starts at 1:40. I suspect part of the problem is that your build is being done completely serially, even for separate compilation. I have no experience with VS, so I don't know why that is. It doesn't seem to be even doing that, though they're separate invocations of DMD. I didn't configure the build infrastructure! Maybe you can? I have no experience with VS, but surely it has some equivalent of ninja -j5? > And all builds are release builds... what good is a debug > build? DMD > is unbelievably slow in debug. If it wasn't already slow > enough... if > I try and build with a debug build, it takes closer to 5 > minutes. > > I suspect one part of the problem is that DMD used to be > built with a C compiler, and now it's built with DMD... it > really should be built with LDC at least? Could be part of the problem on Windows, dunno. Well... ffs... people need to care about this! >_< I agree that the official release of DMD for Windows should be faster, and we should be building it with ldc... if that's the problem.
Re: Backend nearly entirely converted to D
On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 21:40:58 UTC, welkam wrote: On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 14:39:55 UTC, Joakim wrote: I don't know why you think that would matter: I'm using the same compilers to build each DMD version and comparing the build times as the backend was translated to D What did you compared is whether clang or DMD compiles code faster not whether D code compiles faster than C++. To check that you should compile both C++ and D with the same backend. I'm not making any general statements about whether C++ or D compiles faster, only pointing out that in a common setup of building dmd with clang and dmd on linux/x64, I didn't see much of a speed gain. However, I did mention that the frontend should be removed to really measure the backend conversion, so that's what I just did. I built the backends for DMD 2.080.1 through master in the same single-core VPS by slightly modifying src/posix.mak, only replacing the line "all: $G/dmd" with "all: $G/backend.a". Here are the results I got and how many D files were built in each backend: 2.080.1 - 1D 8.0s 2.081.2 - 4D 7.2s 2.082.1 - 27D 6.9s 2.083.0 - 45D 5.6s master d398d8c - 50D 4.3s So the frontend might have been obscuring things, as we see a clear win from moving the backend to D, with only about 10 C/C++ files left in the backend now and compilation time cut almost in half. I think we'll see even more of a gain if the D files in the backend are built all at once.
Re: Profiling DMD's Compilation Time with dmdprof
On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 07:54:56 UTC, Manu wrote: On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 10:30 PM Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 06:08:20 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote: > It was definitely about 4 seconds not too long ago, a few > years at most. No, it's still 4 seconds. digger --offline --config-file=/dev/null -j auto -c local.cache=none build 7.31s user 1.51s system 203% cpu 4.340 total > It does seem to take more time now; I wonder why. If it takes longer, then it's probably because it's being built in one CPU core, or in the release build. https://youtu.be/msWuRlD3zy0 Lol, I saw that link and figured it was either some comedy video, like the Python ones Walter sometimes posts, or you were actually showing us how long it takes. Pretty funny to see the latter. DMD only builds with one core, since it builds altogether. Yes, but your build time is unusually long even with one core. Are the D backend and frontend at least built in parallel to each other? It doesn't seem to be even doing that, though they're separate invocations of DMD. And all builds are release builds... what good is a debug build? DMD is unbelievably slow in debug. If it wasn't already slow enough... if I try and build with a debug build, it takes closer to 5 minutes. I suspect one part of the problem is that DMD used to be built with a C compiler, and now it's built with DMD... it really should be built with LDC at least? Could be part of the problem on Windows, dunno.
Re: Profiling DMD's Compilation Time with dmdprof
On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 07:41:58 UTC, Manu wrote: On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 10:30 PM Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 04:16:44 UTC, Manu wrote: > On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 10:05 AM Vladimir Panteleev via > Digitalmars-d-announce > wrote: >> [...] > > "Indeed, a clean build of DMD itself (about 170’000 lines of > D and 120’000 lines of C/C++) takes no longer than 4 seconds > to build on a rather average developer machine." > > ...what!? DMD takes me... (compiling) ... 1 minute 40 > seconds to build! And because DMD does all-files-at-once > compilation, rather than separate compilation for each > source file, whenever you change just one line in one file, > you incur that entire build time, every time, because it > can't just rebuild the one source file that changed. You > also can't do multi-processor builds with all-in-one build > strategies. > > 4 seconds? That's just untrue. D is actually kinda slow > these days... In my experience it's slower than modern C++ > compilers by quite a lot. It sounds like you're not using "a rather average developer machine" then, as there's no way DMD should be that slow to build on a core i5 or better: https://forum.dlang.org/post/rqukhkpxcvgiefrdc...@forum.dlang.org I'm on an i7 with 8 threads and plenty of ram... although threads are useless, since DMD only uses one ;) Running Windows XP? ;) That does sound like Windows though, as I do remember being surprised how long dmd took to build on Win7 when I tried it 8-9 years back. I still don't think the toolchain should be _that_ much slower than linux though. Btw, the extra cores are _not_ useless for the DMD backend, which has always used separate compilation, whether written in C++ or D.
Re: Profiling DMD's Compilation Time with dmdprof
On Thursday, 8 November 2018 at 04:16:44 UTC, Manu wrote: On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 10:05 AM Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: [...] "Indeed, a clean build of DMD itself (about 170’000 lines of D and 120’000 lines of C/C++) takes no longer than 4 seconds to build on a rather average developer machine." ...what!? DMD takes me... (compiling) ... 1 minute 40 seconds to build! And because DMD does all-files-at-once compilation, rather than separate compilation for each source file, whenever you change just one line in one file, you incur that entire build time, every time, because it can't just rebuild the one source file that changed. You also can't do multi-processor builds with all-in-one build strategies. 4 seconds? That's just untrue. D is actually kinda slow these days... In my experience it's slower than modern C++ compilers by quite a lot. It sounds like you're not using "a rather average developer machine" then, as there's no way DMD should be that slow to build on a core i5 or better: https://forum.dlang.org/post/rqukhkpxcvgiefrdc...@forum.dlang.org
Re: Backend nearly entirely converted to D
On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 15:12:13 UTC, Dukc wrote: On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 14:39:55 UTC, Joakim wrote: I don't know why you think that would matter: I'm using the same compilers to build each DMD version and comparing the build times as the backend was translated to D. Because generally, LLVM compilers provide faster code, but compile slower than Digital Mars compilers AFAIK. So if you compile the D code with DMD but C code with LDC, the program will likely compile faster but execute slower as increasing portions are written in D, compared to using the same backend for both languages. I'm not sure if you benchmarked the time used to build DMD, or the time used by generated DMD to compile some other program. If it was the former, the "real" result is probably worse than your results. But if it was the latter, it is likely better. The former, if it wasn't clear. It's also possible something slowed down building the frontend in successive DMD versions, so ideally I'd only time building the backend for each DMD version, but I haven't looked into that.
Re: Backend nearly entirely converted to D
On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 11:22:13 UTC, Dukc wrote: On Wednesday, 7 November 2018 at 08:31:21 UTC, Joakim wrote: I just benchmarked building the last couple versions of DMD, when most of the backend was converted to D, by building them with the latest DMD 2.083.0 official release and clang 6.0 in a single-core linux/x64 VPS. Here are the times I got, best of 3 runs for each: 2.081.2 - 11.5s 2.082.1 - 10.5s 2.083.0 - 9.9s master - 10.8s Not quite the gains hoped for, particularly with those last large files you just converted to D seemingly slowing compilation down Could this be because you used a LLVM compiler for the C code but a Mars compiler for D code? If one either uses DMC for C or LDC for D, perhaps the results will be better. I don't know why you think that would matter: I'm using the same compilers to build each DMD version and comparing the build times as the backend was translated to D. Maybe I'd get different results by using different compilers, but these are two fairly fast and commonly used compilers so they're worth checking with.
Re: Backend nearly entirely converted to D
On Tuesday, 6 November 2018 at 22:12:02 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: With the recent merging of the last of the big files machobj.d: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/8911 I'm happy to say we're over the hump in converting the backend to D! Great! Although I wish it didn't have to be you mostly doing this grunt work. Remaining files are minor: tk.c, cgen.c, dt.c, fp.c, os.c, outbuf.c, sizecheck.c, strtold.c and mem.c. I'll probably leave a couple in C anyway - os.c and strtold.c. sizecheck.c will just go away upon completion. Thanks to everyone who helped out with this! Of course, the code remains as ugly as it was in C. It'll take time to bit by bit refactor it into idiomatic D. I just benchmarked building the last couple versions of DMD, when most of the backend was converted to D, by building them with the latest DMD 2.083.0 official release and clang 6.0 in a single-core linux/x64 VPS. Here are the times I got, best of 3 runs for each: 2.081.2 - 11.5s 2.082.1 - 10.5s 2.083.0 - 9.9s master - 10.8s Not quite the gains hoped for, particularly with those last large files you just converted to D seemingly slowing compilation down, but maybe it will get better with refactoring and when the entire backend is compiled at once, rather than the DMD separate compilation used now. The more immediate benefit is to get rid of all the parallel .h files, which were a constant source of bugs when they didn't match the .d versions. I was going to ask why you wouldn't need those headers for your C/C++ compiler, DMC, but it looks like you've translated that to mostly D already: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Compiler/tree/master/dm/src/dmc
Re: Lost in Translation: Encapsulation
On Tuesday, 6 November 2018 at 15:14:55 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: Last week, inspired by another discussion in these forums about D's private-to-the-module form of encapsulation, I spent a few hours putting a new article together for the blog. Ali, Joakim, Nicholas helped me get it in shape. The blog: https://dlang.org/blog/2018/11/06/lost-in-translation-encapsulation/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9up2yo/lost_in_translation_encapsulation_in_d/ Nicely done, think this could do well on proggit/HN/lobste.rs.
Re: LDC 1.13.0-beta1
On Friday, 2 November 2018 at 21:04:13 UTC, kinke wrote: Glad to announce the first beta for LDC 1.13: * Based on D 2.083.0. * The Windows packages are now fully self-sufficient, i.e., a Visual Studio/C++ Build Tools installation isn't required anymore. * Substantial debug info improvements for GDB. Full release log and downloads: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases/tag/v1.13.0-beta1 Thanks to all contributors! I've added native Termux builds for Android, including x86 for the first time. Cross-compiling to Android/x64 mostly works, but LDC itself segfaults when cross-compiled and run on Android/x64, likely because it uses a 128-bit real just like AArch64. I'll see if I can get that fixed before the final 1.13 release.
Re: smile.amazon.com Promotion
On Thursday, 1 November 2018 at 03:18:44 UTC, SealabJaster wrote: On Monday, 29 October 2018 at 16:40:20 UTC, FooledDonor wrote: On Monday, 29 October 2018 at 16:01:38 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: One of the easiest ways to support the D Language Foundation is using smile.amazon.com when you make a purchase. Until Nov 2, they're running a special where they're donating 5% (10 times the usual amount) you buy through AmazonSmile. smile.amazon.com/ch/47-5352856 Perhaps a fundamental principle is not clear enough at the foundation: transparency. Where is the vision of the third and fourth quarter? Where are the deliveries of things in the pipeline? What is the progress of the various jobs started? Which people is funding, with how much money and for what expected results? Where is the newCTFE? Was the work on this point financed by the foundation? I've never seen a report on the state of affairs, neither from the president, nor from Andrei, nor from Walter. How do you hope to obtain trust and funding, if NO one even deigns to give the least development plan or feedback on past developments? It seems that everyone has locked up in their ivory tower ... It's kind of discouraging to see that your post, as well as another thread asking something similar regarding the vision document[1] have gone unanswered... Maybe the people who could answer these things just don't see them, or maybe they're purposefully being quiet. It would be nice to know what's going on at the very least ;( [1] https://forum.dlang.org/thread/qmwovarkjgvxyibsl...@forum.dlang.org My guess, and this is purely a guess, is that they got discouraged by how few people paid attention to the Vision document or donated to the foundation on Opencollective and haven't bothered with this stuff since. I think that's a mistake, as you may need to do this stuff for awhile before it picks up. In any case, I don't care that it isn't happening, as I always said that it's better to have decentralized bounties, like we had on bountysource, rather than centralized funding through the D Foundation. Maybe the upcoming targeted campaigns will be a good middle ground, in that you will be able to directly contribute to specific targets: https://dlang.org/blog/2018/07/13/funding-code-d/
Re: Add D front-end, libphobos library, and D2 testsuite... to GCC
On Monday, 29 October 2018 at 09:57:46 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: On 10/28/2018 8:43 PM, Mike Parker wrote: Congratulations are in order for Iain Buclaw. His efforts have been rewarded in a big way. Last Friday, he got the greenlight to move forward with submitting his changes into GCC: Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9sb74k/the_d_language_frontend_finally_merged_into_gcc_9/ HackerNews (at #12 on the front page): https://news.ycombinator.com/news On Lobsters too: https://lobste.rs/s/9ziils/d_language_front_end_finally_merged_into
Re: New Initiative for Donations
On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 17:20:08 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 06:19:29 +, Joakim wrote: On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 05:47:05 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 02:38:08 +, Joakim wrote: As with D, sometimes the new _is_ better, so perhaps you shouldn't assume old is better either. There's no assuming going on. Cryptocurrencies are worse than credit cards for everything that normal people care about, Such as? I already noted that they're easier and cheaper, you simply flatly state that "normal people" find them worse. In most countries where people are going to donate to D, the vast majority of people have access to a credit card. That's not really true, and that's not actually something "worse" about cryptocurrencies. If you really mean have some lying around, it is true that more are using credit cards. If you actually mean access, crypto-currencies are pretty easy to buy these days. If for some reason cryptocurrencies become popular and sufficiently stable to be used as currency, I have no doubt that existing credit card companies will start offering automatic currency exchange, so you can have an account in USD and pay a vendor who accepts only Ethereum, or vice versa. As such, accepting credit card payments is good enough. I don't know what we'd be waiting for, the tokens I mentioned are all worth billions and widely used, particularly by techies: Very few merchants accept any sort of cryptocurrency. I think I've found three. One was through a cryptocurrency forum, and one was Valve announcing that they would stop accepting it. You must not have looked very hard, there are online retailers accepting crypto-tokens and websites that will make payments for you on Amazon or other sites through Bitcoin: https://www.overstock.com/blockchain https://purse.io/shop Why would I wait for antiquated credit-card companies to accept these tokens? The whole point of these new tokens is to obsolete the credit card companies. You wouldn't wait. You haven't waited. For you, the benefits are large enough and the downsides small enough that it doesn't make sense to wait. But I'm not you. No, I'm not much of a cryptocurrency user or online shopper even. I mostly buy locally with cash. I would wait because I've lost access to important credentials before and had to send a copy of my government-issued ID to a company to get them to deactivate two-factor authentication. I've had to use password reset mechanisms frequently. I don't trust myself not to lose access to a cryptocurrency private key. And that would destroy currency and lose me my life savings. I don't blame you for being careful if you've had these problems, most of which I've never had, but you wildly exaggerate with your last sentence. Crypto-tokens are a replacement for cash and credit cards, which you should never be carrying around more than a couple hundred or thousand dollars worth of. If you're carrying around your life savings in cash or credit cards and are worried about moving them to bitcoin, you have much bigger problems. ;) I would wait because I want a mechanism to dispute transactions. Maybe I authorized that transaction, but the merchant didn't deliver. I don't think the payment provider is the right mechanism for that. The seller wants to protect their reputation and your payment is publicly verifiable through the blockchain. There are much better ways to build trust through those building blocks than the currently broken credit card chargeback process: https://www.shopify.com/retail/what-is-a-chargeback I would wait because I want an environmentally-friendly system instead of one that uses as much electricity as Afghanistan to process fifteen transactions per second. Yes, I noted the Bitcoin "Proof of work" problem in this forum almost five years ago, so I'm well aware: https://forum.dlang.org/post/xzuzvykrqouqlsjmk...@forum.dlang.org There are "Proof of stake" crypto-tokens out there that purport to avoid that issue: https://blockgeeks.com/guides/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake/ Ether, one of the tokens I mentioned originally, is moving to this scheme. I would wait because cryptocurrencies have extremely volatile exchange rates, which makes it difficult to set prices or store value in them. If you're buying online, which is what we're talking about, it's trivially simple to track the exchange rates and instantaneously set store prices accordingly. It may be a bit different for consumers, but by the time they're all using some payments tech like this, the exchange rates will likely have settled down. I would wait because I can't use cryptocurrency to do anything useful, so I would incur a fee to transfer money into it and another to transfer money out of it. Not necessarily- it depends on who you're buying your tokens from- and crypto-tokens usually work out cheaper once you include other
Re: New Initiative for Donations
On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 05:47:05 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 02:38:08 +, Joakim wrote: As with D, sometimes the new _is_ better, so perhaps you shouldn't assume old is better either. There's no assuming going on. Cryptocurrencies are worse than credit cards for everything that normal people care about, Such as? I already noted that they're easier and cheaper, you simply flatly state that "normal people" find them worse. and they're better than credit cards for illegal transactions. Yes, just like cash, and have other benefits that come with cash too. This might eventually change, and we can re-evaluate then. If for some reason cryptocurrencies become popular and sufficiently stable to be used as currency, I have no doubt that existing credit card companies will start offering automatic currency exchange, so you can have an account in USD and pay a vendor who accepts only Ethereum, or vice versa. As such, accepting credit card payments is good enough. I don't know what we'd be waiting for, the tokens I mentioned are all worth billions and widely used, particularly by techies: https://coinmarketcap.com Why would I wait for antiquated credit-card companies to accept these tokens? The whole point of these new tokens is to obsolete the credit card companies.
Re: New Initiative for Donations
On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 22:35:40 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote: On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 10:25:17 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 10:18:51 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 10:12:50 UTC, Joakim wrote: Any effort underway to take Bitcoin Cash, Ether, or Ripple as donations? The current payment options seem fairly antiquated: credit cards, wire transfers, and the like. Not that I'm aware of. I'd hardly call credit cards antiquated, though :-) 60-year old tech seems pretty old to me: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card#BankAmericard_and_Master_Charge And yet it's still by far the most common payment method. So what if it isn't trendy. Deal with it. In the US maybe, not in most of the world, where they're still using cash. ;) I almost never use my cards, and like that crypto-currencies have more in similar to cash. On Thursday, 25 October 2018 at 23:10:50 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 10:35:40PM +, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 10:25:17 UTC, Joakim wrote: > On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 10:18:51 UTC, Mike Parker > wrote: > > On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 10:12:50 UTC, Joakim > > wrote: [...] > > > [...] > > > > Not that I'm aware of. I'd hardly call credit cards > > antiquated, though :-) > > 60-year old tech seems pretty old to me: > > https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card#BankAmericard_and_Master_Charge > And yet it's still by far the most common payment method. So what if it isn't trendy. Deal with it. Common fallacy: new == better. As with D, sometimes the new _is_ better, so perhaps you shouldn't assume old is better either.
Re: shared - i need it to be useful
On Monday, 22 October 2018 at 00:22:19 UTC, Manu wrote: On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 2:35 PM Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote: On 10/21/2018 2:08 PM, Walter Bright wrote: > On 10/21/2018 12:20 PM, Nicholas Wilson wrote: >> Yes, but the problem you describe is arises from implicit >> conversion in the other direction, which is not part of the >> proposal. > > It's Manu's example. Then I don't know what the proposal is. Pieces of it appear to be scattered over numerous posts, mixed in with other text, No no, they're repeated, not scattered, because I seem to have to keep repeating it over and over, because nobody is reading the text, or perhaps imaging there is a lot more text than there is. I told you this is what happens with forum posts 4 days ago, yet you didn't listen: https://forum.dlang.org/post/fokdcnzircoiuhrhz...@forum.dlang.org opinions, and handwavy stuff. You mean like every post in opposition which disregards the rules and baselessly asserts it's a terrible idea? :/ There's nothing to point to that is "the proposal". You can go back to the OP, not a single detail is changed at any point, but I've repeated it a whole bunch of times (including in direct response to your last post) and the summary has become more concise, but not different. 1. Shared has no read or write access to data 2. Functions with shared arguments are threadsafe with respect to those arguments a. This is a commitment that must be true in _absolute terms_ (there exists discussion about the ways that neighbours must not undermine this promise) b. There are numerous examples demonstrating how to configure this (TL;DR: use encapsulation, and @trusted at the bottom of the stack) If you can find a legitimate example where those rules don't hold, I want to see it. But every example so far has been based on a faulty premise where those 2 simple rules were not actually applied. Put it all together in a 2-3 page proposal elsewhere, so he doesn't have to hunt everything out in a blizzard of forum posts. I responded to your faulty program directly with the correct program, and you haven't acknowledged it. Did you see it? I suggest you and Manu write up a proper proposal. Something that is complete, has nothing else in it, has a rationale, illuminating examples, and explains why alternatives are inferior. I have written this program a couple of times, including in direct response to your last sample program. You seem to have dismissed it... where is your response to that program, or my last entire post? For examples of how to do it: https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/tree/master/DIPs Trying to rewrite the semantics of shared is not a simple task, doing multithreading correctly is a minefield of "OOPS! I didn't think of that!" and if anything cries out for a DIP, your and Manu's proposal does. Yes, I agree it's DIP worthy. But given the almost nothing but overt hostility I've received here, why on earth would I waste my time writing a DIP? I put months into my other DIP which sits gathering dust... if this thread inspired any confidence that it would be well-received I would make the effort, but the critical reception we've seen here is... a bit strange. It's a 2-point proposal, the rules are **SO SIMPLE**, which is why I love it. How it can be misunderstood is something I'm having trouble understanding, and I don't know how to make it any clearer than I already have; numerous times over, including in my last reply to you, which you have ignored and dismissed it seems. Please go back and read my response to your last program. He did not say to write a full DIP, just a proposal, so he knows exactly what you mean, just as I said. It will require a DIP eventually, but he didn't ask you to write one now.
Re: Interesting Observation from JAXLondon
On Sunday, 21 October 2018 at 01:12:44 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote: On 10/12/18 4:05 AM, Vijay Nayar wrote: But the D community has also been very receptive of changes to the language The community is. I don't feel like it's been true of the leadership for some years now (and I don't mean just W) One thing that does concern me, is the avenues in which people can discover D. For me personally, after a particularly nasty C++ project, I just googled for "alternatives to C++" and that's how I found D back in 2009 or so. But the same search today turns up nothing about D. I'm not sure sure how people are supposed to find D. This is a VERY important thing, and it's true for many of us (myself included). This why it was a HUGE mistake when the community decided it should become taboo to promote D as a redesigned C++. That was ALWAYS D's core strength, we all know it, that's why many (if not most) of us are here, and hell, that's literally what D was *intentionally designed* to be. But then political correctness came and threw that angle out the window, in favor of this awkward "fast code fast" nonsense, and we've been fighting the uphill "I don't understand the point of D" image battle ever since. Simple, C++ is increasingly seen as irrelevant by those choosing a new language, so D's real competition is now Go, Rust, Swift, Nim, Zig, etc. These are people who want to write "fast code fast," well except for Rust users, who value ownership more. Also, D can pitch itself to Java/C# users who need more performance with that softer pitch, because many of them have been burned by C++ and would recoil if you made the explicit C++ comparison. It is well-known that Rust and Go are attracting users from the Java and scripting communities, D needs to attract them too, as the Tilix dev noted to me last year: "[M]y background is in Java. I found it quite interesting at DConf when I asked how many people came from a non C/C++ background that only one other fellow raised his hand... I tend to get more annoyed about the negativity in the forums with regards to GC. I do feel that sometimes people get so wrapped up in what D needs for it to be a perfect systems language (i.e. no GC, memory safety, etc.), it gets overlooked that it is a very good language for building native applications as it is now. While D is often compared to Rust, in some ways the comparison to Go is more interesting to me. Both are GC-based languages and both started as systems languages, however Go pivoted and doubled down on the GC and has seen success. One of the Red Hat products I support, OpenShift, leverages Kubernetes (a Google project) for container orchestration and it’s written in Go. I think D as a language is far superior to Go, and I wish we would toot our horn a little more in this regard instead of the constant negative discussion around systems programming." https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/11/on-tilix-and-d-an-interview-with-gerald-nunn/
Re: Need help with setting up LDC to cross-compile to Android/ARM
On Friday, 19 October 2018 at 22:19:31 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 02:41:48PM -0700, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...] In the meantime, is there a particular version of the NDK that I should use? Currently I have android-ndk-r13b-linux-x86_64.zip installed. Will it work? [...] Haha, I feel so silly now. NDK r13b does not seem to have the sysroot subdir required by the clang build command, that's why it couldn't find the system headers. So I ditched r13b and installed r17b instead, and now I can build the runtime successfully! Ah, that makes sense, that NDK is ancient, ;) it came out two years ago: https://developer.android.com/ndk/downloads/revision_history Official D support for Android was added to ldc 1.4 last September, which was after NDK r15c came out, when they switched to that sysroot directory with unified headers for all Android versions, so that's what ldc uses. Before that, each Android version had its headers in a separate directory, which isn't supported by LDC. I tried ldc-build-runtime with --ninja and it came back with a bunch of errors about "cortex-a8" being an unsupported target, and then segfaulted. That's likely because you left off the double-quotes around the list of semicolon-separated flags passed to ldc-build-runtime --dFlags: the double quotes are required, as shown in the docs. On Saturday, 20 October 2018 at 04:01:37 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 08:50:36PM +0000, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 21:23:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: > I'm trying to follow the instructions on this page: > > https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android [...] On a side note, the last section on that page mentions not knowing how to create a keystore from scratch; actually, it's very simple with the `keytool` utility that comes with the Oracle JRE. I added the steps on the talk page. The only thing I'm unsure about is whether keytool is available natively on Android. If not, then you'll have to generate the keystore on a PC and copy it over to Android afterwards. From scratch meaning without using keytool, ie OpenSSL or some other hashing/fingerprinting tool alone, because keytool isn't available in the Termux app. As mentioned at the end of the wiki page, I used to manually edit the apk hashed manifests using OpenSSL alone until that apksigner tool was added later.
Re: Need help with setting up LDC to cross-compile to Android/ARM
On Friday, 19 October 2018 at 20:50:36 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 21:23:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: I'm trying to follow the instructions on this page: https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android [...] Hmm, that's weird: can you extract the full compiler command for that file? For example, if you use Ninja, by appending --ninja to ldc-build-runtime, it will tell you the full command that failed. Not sure if Make has a way to get that too. Also, if you're using a system-provided LDC, it may not support Android, if it wasn't built against our slightly tweaked llvm: https://github.com/ldc-developers/llvm In that case, use the LDC download from github instead: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/releases
Re: Need help with setting up LDC to cross-compile to Android/ARM
On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 21:23:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: I'm trying to follow the instructions on this page: https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android [...] Hmm, that's weird: can you extract the full compiler command for that file? For example, if you use Ninja, by appending --ninja to ldc-build-runtime, it will tell you the full command that failed. Not sure if Make has a way to get that too.
[OT] Android
On Thursday, 18 October 2018 at 19:37:24 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 07:09:42PM +, Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...] I often have the impression that a lot of things are going slower than necessary because a mentality where the perfect is in the way of good. That is indeed an all-too-frequent malady around these parts, sad to say. Which has the sad consequence that despite all efforts, there are still unfinished areas in D, and promises that haven't materialized in years (like multiple alias this). Still, the parts of D that are working well form a very powerful and comfortable-to-use language. Not quite the ideal we wish it to be, but IMO much closer than any other language I've seen yet. Recently I began dabbling in Android programming, and the one thing that keeps sticking out to me is how painful writing Java is. Almost every day of writing Java code has me wishing for this or that feature in D. Slices. Closures. Meta-programming. I found most of my time spent fighting with language limitations rather than make progress with the problem domain. Yes, this is why I began the Android port: I couldn't imagine writing Java. Eventually I resorted to generating Java code from D for some fo the most painful repetitive parts, and the way things are looking, I'm likely to be doing a lot more of that. I fear the way things are going will have be essentially writing a D to Java compiler at some point! Why not just use the Android port of D?
Re: Interfacing D with C: Arrays Part 1
On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 15:20:08 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: I had intended to publish the next GC series post early this month, but after many revisions and discussions with a couple of reviewers, I've decided to put it on hold until something gets worked out about the conflation of destruction and finalization in D (something I'll be pushing for soon). [...] "article is has morphed"
Re: shared - i need it to be useful
On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 23:12:48 UTC, Manu wrote:
On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 2:15 PM Stanislav Blinov via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 19:25:33 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 12:05 PM Stanislav Blinov via
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> On Wednesday, 17 October 2018 at 18:46:18 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>
>> > I've said this a bunch of times, there are 2 rules:
>> > 1. shared inhibits read and write access to members
>> > 2. `shared` methods must be threadsafe
>> >
>> >>From there, shared becomes interesting and useful.
>>
>> Oh God...
>>
>> void atomicInc(shared int* i) { /* ... */ }
>>
>> Now what? There are no "methods" for ints, only UFCS. Those
>> functions can be as safe as you like, but if you allow
>> implicit promotion of int* to shared int*, you *allow
>> implicit races*.
>
> This function is effectively an intrinsic. It's unsafe by
> definition.
Only if implicit conversion is allowed. If it isn't, that's
likely @trusted, and this:
void atomicInc(ref shared int);
can even be @safe.
In this case, with respect to the context (a single int)
atomicInc()
is ALWAYS safe, even with implicit conversion. You can
atomicInc() a
thread-local int perfectly safely.
> It's a tool for implementing threadsafe machinery.
> No user can just start doing atomic operations on random ints
> and say
> "it's threadsafe", you must encapsulate the threadsafe
> functionality
> into some sort of object that aggregates all concerns and
> presents an
> intellectually sound api.
Threadsafety starts and ends with the programmer. By your
logic *all* functions operating on `shared` are unsafe then.
As far as compiler is concerned, there would be no difference
between these two:
struct S {}
void atomicInc(ref shared S);
and
struct S { void atomicInc() shared { /* ... */ } }
The signatures of those two functions are exactly the same.
How is that different from a function taking a shared int
pointer or reference?
It's not, atomicInc() of an int is always safe with respect to
the int itself.
You can call atomicInc() on an unshared int and it's perfectly
fine,
but now you need to consider context, and that's a problem for
the
design of the higher-level scope.
To maintain thread-safety, the int in question must be
appropriately contained.
The problem is that the same as the example I presented before,
which I'll repeat:
struct InvalidProgram
{
int x;
void fun() { ++x; }
void gun() shared { atomicInc(); }
}
The method gun() (and therefore the whole object) is NOT
threadsafe by
my definition, because fun() violates the threadsafety of gun().
The situation applies equally here that:
int x;
atomicInc();
++x; // <- by my definition, this 'API' (increment an int)
violates
the threadsafety of atomicInc(), and atomicInc() is therefore
not
threadsafe.
`int` doesn't present a threadsafe API, so int is by
definition, NOT threadsafe. atomicInc() should be @system, and
not @trusted.
If you intend to share an int, use Atomic!int, because it has a
threadsafe API.
atomicInc(shared int*) is effectively just an unsafe intrinsic,
and
its only use is at ground-level implementation of threadsafe
machinery, like malloc() and free().
> Let me try one:
>
> void free(void*) { ... }
>
> Now what? I might have dangling pointers... it's a
> catastrophe!
One could argue that it should be void free(ref void* p) { /*
...
*/ p = null; }
void *p2 = p;
free(p);
p2.crash();
As a matter of fact, in my own allocators memory blocks
allocated by them are passed by value and are non-copyable,
they're not just void[] as in std.experimental.allocator. One
must 'move' them to pass ownership, and that includes
deallocation. But that's another story altogether.
Right, now you're talking about move semantics to implement
transfer of ownership... you might recall I was arguing this
exact case to express transferring ownership of objects between
threads earlier. This talk of blunt casts and "making sure
everything is good" is all just great, but it doesn't mean
anything interesting with respect to `shared`. It should be
interesting even without unsafe casts.
> It's essentially the same argument.
> This isn't a function that professes to do something that
> people might
> misunderstand and try to use in an unsafe way, it's a
> low-level
> implementation device, which is used to build larger *useful*
> constructs.
You're missing the point, again. You have an int. You pass a
pointer to it to some API that takes an int*. You continue to
use your int as just an int.
You have written an invalid program. I can think of an infinite
number
of ways to write an invalid program.
In this case, don't have an `int`, instead, have an Atomic!int;
you
now guarantee appropriate access, problem solved!
If you do have an int, don't pass it to other threads at random
when
you don't have any idea what they intend to do with it! That's
basic
common sense. You don't
Re: Interesting Observation from JAXLondon
On Friday, 12 October 2018 at 07:13:33 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 13:00 +, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote: […] Suggestions? My guess is that the reason they've heard of those languages is because their developers were writing small projects using Go and Rust, but not D. I fear it may already be too late. Go, and now Rust, got marketing hype from an organisation putting considerable resources into the projects. This turned into effort from the community that increased rapidly, turning the hype into frameworks and libraries, and word of mouth marketing. It is the libraries and frameworks that make for traction. Now the hype is gone, Go and Rust, and their libraries and frameworks, are well positioned and with significant penetration into the minds of developers. Talk to Java developers and they have heard of Go and Rust, but not D. Go is more likely to them because of Docker and the context of The Web, for which Go has a strong pitch. They have heard of Rust but usually see it as not relevant to them, despite Firefox. Talk to Python developers and they know of Go, many of them of Rust, but almost never D. C and C++ are seen as the languages of performance extensions, though Rust increasingly has a play there. D has vibe.d, PyD, GtkD, and lots of other bits, but they've never quite had the resources of the equivalents in Go and Rust. Also the D community as a whole is effectively introvert, whereas Go and Rust communities have been quite extrovert. "Build it and they will come" just doesn't work, you have to be pushy and market stuff, often using guerilla marketing, to get mindshare. D has an excellent position against Python (for speed of development but without the performance hit) but no chance of penetrating the places where Python is strong due to lack of libraries and frameworks that people use – cf. Pandas, SciKit.Learn, etc. D has an excellent position against Go as a language except that Go has goroutines and channels. The single threaded event loop and callback approach is losing favour. Kotlin is introducing Kotlin Coroutines which is a step on from the observables system of Rx. Structured concurrency abstracting away from fibres and threadpools. Java may well get this via Project Loom which is Quasar being inserted into the JVM directly. Whatever D has it doesn't seem to be going to compete in this space. D without the GC has a sort of position against Rust, but I think that battle has been lost. Rust has won in the "the new C that isn't Go and doesn't have a garbage collector, and isn't C++, but does have all the nice monads stuff, oh and memory safety mostly". When it comes down to it D will carry on as a niche language loved by a few unknown to most. There is truth in much of what you say, but D has to pick its battles. Given the design of the language, I see two primary use-cases right now: 1. apps that need some level of performance, ie Tilix 2. Low-level tools that need a lot of performance, ie Weka or Sociomantic Going after some established tool like Pandas and its mix of Python and C is likely to fail right now, as D is never going to be as easy as Python, and presumably Pandas has already sped up whatever it needs to in C. Maybe you could create a better tool in D some day when the D ecosystem is larger, but I don't think it would be the best approach today. We need to think about what markets D would be best suited for and aim for those, while at the same time resisting the temptation to make D too specialized for those initial markets, which is a trap many other languages fall into.
Re: Interesting Observation from JAXLondon
On Thursday, 11 October 2018 at 12:22:19 UTC, Vijay Nayar wrote: On Thursday, 11 October 2018 at 11:50:39 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Thursday, 11 October 2018 at 07:58:39 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: This was supposed to come to this list not the learn list. On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 07:57 +0100, Russel Winder wrote: It seems that in the modern world of Cloud and Kubernetes, and the charging model of the Cloud vendors, that the startup times of JVMs is becoming a financial problem. A number of high profile companies are switching from Java to Go to solve this financial difficulty. It's a pity D is not in there with a pitch. I suspect it is because the companies have heard of Go (and Rust), but not D. I doubt D could make a pitch that would be heard, no google behind it and all that jazz. D is better aimed at startups like Weka who're trying to disrupt the status quo than Java shops trying to sustain it, while shaving off some up-front time. Personally I think this is going to change soon depending on what options are available. The amount of time and money that companies, especially companies using Java and AWS, are putting in to saving money with Nomad or Kubernetics on the promise of having more services per server is quite high. However, these JVM based services run in maybe 1-2GB of RAM at the minimum, so they get maybe 4 services per box. A microservice built using D and vibe.d could easily perform the same work using less CPU and maybe only 500MB of RAM. The scale of improvement is roughly the same as what you would get by moving to containerization. If D has the proper libraries and integrations available with the tools that are commonly used, it could easily break through and become the serious language to use for the competitive business of the future. But libraries and integrations will make or break that. It's not just Java you're up against, it's all the libraries like SpringBoot and all the integrations with AWS systems like SQS, SNS, Kinesis, MySQL, PostGREs, Redis, etc. My hope is that D will be part of that future and I'm trying to add libraries as time permits. I'm skeptical of that cloud microservices wave building up right now. I suspect what's coming is a decentralized mobile wave, just as the PC once replaced big iron like mainframes and minicomputers, since top mobile CPUs now rival desktop CPUs: "the [Apple] A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance" https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4 Many of the crypto-coins are trying to jumpstart a decentralized app ecosystem: someone will succeed.
Re: Interesting Observation from JAXLondon
On Thursday, 11 October 2018 at 07:58:39 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: This was supposed to come to this list not the learn list. On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 07:57 +0100, Russel Winder wrote: It seems that in the modern world of Cloud and Kubernetes, and the charging model of the Cloud vendors, that the startup times of JVMs is becoming a financial problem. A number of high profile companies are switching from Java to Go to solve this financial difficulty. It's a pity D is not in there with a pitch. I suspect it is because the companies have heard of Go (and Rust), but not D. I doubt D could make a pitch that would be heard, no google behind it and all that jazz. D is better aimed at startups like Weka who're trying to disrupt the status quo than Java shops trying to sustain it, while shaving off some up-front time.
Re: Iain Buclaw at GNU Tools Cauldron 2018
On Sunday, 7 October 2018 at 15:41:43 UTC, greentea wrote: Date: September 7 to 9, 2018. Location: Manchester, UK GDC - D front-end GCC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXRJJ_lrSxE Thanks for the link, just watched the whole video. The first half-hour sets the standard as an intro to the language, as only a compiler developer other than the main implementer could give, ie someone with fresh eyes. I loved that Iain started off with a list of real-world projects. That's a mistake a lot of tech talks make, ie not motivating _why_ anybody should care about their tech and simply diving into the tech itself. I hadn't heard some of that info either, great way to begin. My only nitpick is that I wish he'd emphasized how much of a focus D puts on metaprogramming, as I've noticed a lot of comments on proggit/HN/etc. saying that the power and ease of use of D's metaprogramming really stood out for them when trying the language.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Thursday, 4 October 2018 at 10:02:28 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Thu, 2018-10-04 at 08:06 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: […] The link in my OP links to a guy who maintained a spreadsheet of Apple-related conferences as evidence. He lists several that went away and says nothing replaced them. If you don't even examine the evidence provided, I'm not sure why we should care about your opinions. So Apple conferences are a dead end. Remember though that this is the top developer ecosystem on the planet right now, as iOS apps bring in more revenue than Android still. Python, C++, Go, Rust, all these languages have thriving conferences. You just have to look at the world-wide increase in the number of such conferences for the data required. But then my opinion, and indeed my data, doesn't seem matter to you so we might as well just stop communicating since you are never going to change you mind about this issue, even though you are actually wrong. I've presented evidence in a handy link, you give none. I could be wrong about anything, including that the Earth is round and I'm not in the Matrix. But to convince me that I am, I'll need evidence, same as I've presented to you.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Thursday, 4 October 2018 at 08:54:29 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On Thursday, 4 October 2018 at 08:06:24 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Thursday, 4 October 2018 at 07:53:54 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: [...] Did anybody pay attention to the live talks either? ;) That's the real comparison. Anyway, the reason I'm giving to prerecord talks is so you can watch them on your own time before the conference. Watching prerecorded talks with everybody else at a conference is layering stupid on top of stupid. :D Sure, but you really think it's an appropriate use of my free time spending 22 hours (which may as well be half a month) watching prerecorded talks instead of contributing? That's a strange question: do you prefer being forced to sit through all 22 hours live at DConf? At least with pre-recorded talks, you have a choice of which ones to watch.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Thursday, 4 October 2018 at 07:12:03 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Wed, 2018-10-03 at 18:46 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: […] I don't doubt that some are like you and prefer viewing live, but given how conferences keep dying off and online tech talks are booming, you're in an extreme minority that prefers that high-cost live version. That means the market inevitably stops catering to you, which is why the talk-driven conference format is dying off. And new conferences keep being started and being successful. And many just keep on going, often getting more and more successful. Your personal view of conferences cannot be stated as global truth, since it patently is not fact, and evidence indicates not true, it is just your opinion. The link in my OP links to a guy who maintained a spreadsheet of Apple-related conferences as evidence. He lists several that went away and says nothing replaced them. If you don't even examine the evidence provided, I'm not sure why we should care about your opinions. On Thursday, 4 October 2018 at 07:53:54 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 16:17:48 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 01:28:37 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: On 10/2/18 4:34 AM, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 09:39:14 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: [...] It is not clear what you disagree with, since almost nothing you say has any bearing on my original post. To summarize, I suggest changing the currently talk-driven DConf format to either 1. a more decentralized collection of meetups all over the world, where most of the talks are pre-recorded, and the focus is more on introducing new users to the language or 2. at least ditching most of the talks at a DConf still held at a central location, maybe keeping only a couple panel discussions that benefit from an audience to ask questions, and spending most of the time like the hackathon at the last DConf, ie actually meeting in person. This point has a subtle flaw. Many of the talks raise points of discussion that would otherwise go without discussion, and potentially unnoticed, if it were not for the person bringing it up. The talks routinely serve as a launchpad for the nightly dinner sessions. Benjamin Thauts 2016 talk about shared libraries is one such example. Indeed every single year has brought at least one (but usually more) talk that opened up some new line of investigation for the dinner discussions. I thought it was pretty obvious from my original post, since I volunteered to help with the pre-recorded talks, but the idea is to have pre-recorded talks no matter whether DConf is held in a central location or not. I went to a conference once where they had mixed live talks and prerecorded talks - questions where taken at the end to the speaker of the prerecorded talk via a sip call. The organisers at the end admitted that the prerecorded talks experiment failed. No one really paid attention to any of the content in it. Did anybody pay attention to the live talks either? ;) That's the real comparison. Anyway, the reason I'm giving to prerecord talks is so you can watch them on your own time before the conference. Watching prerecorded talks with everybody else at a conference is layering stupid on top of stupid. :D
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 17:51:00 UTC, Russel Winder wrote: On Wed, 2018-10-03 at 17:26 +, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: […] At least look at the first two bullet points in my post responding to Adam, because you're missing the entire point of my suggestions, which is that certain things like talks are better suited to online whereas conferences are more suited for in-person interaction. In your opinion. In my opinion, online material is a waste of time, I never watch YouTube videos, for me it is a waste of my time. But that is the point, different people have a different view. This doesn't mean I am right or wrong, it means different people have different ways of dealing with material. I like a live presentation that I can then ignore *or* take up with a gusto with the presenter, or other people, after the session. Conferences allow this. Presentations are an introduction to interaction with others. For me. Others prefer to consume videos and have no interactions about the material. Personal differences. Except that you can also view the videos at home, then discuss them later at a conference, which is the actual suggestion here. Since there is a population of people who like online stuff, then online stuff there must be. As there are people who like a live presentation and post session discussion, this must also happen. The two are not in conflict. They are in conflict because the cost of doing it live is much, much higher. DConf organizers' goal should be to enable the widest reach at the lowest cost, not catering to off-the-wall requests from a select few like yourself. I don't doubt that some are like you and prefer viewing live, but given how conferences keep dying off and online tech talks are booming, you're in an extreme minority that prefers that high-cost live version. That means the market inevitably stops catering to you, which is why the talk-driven conference format is dying off.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 17:13:51 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote: On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 16:21:45 UTC, Joakim wrote: Like most of the responses in this thread, I have no idea why you're stumping for in-person interaction, when all my suggestions were geared around having _more in-person interaction_. If you're still not sure what I mean, read this long post I wrote fisking Adam's similar post: https://forum.dlang.org/post/eoygemytghynpogvl...@forum.dlang.org Perhaps you did not get my point? No, I got it, you didn't get mine. - I have nothing against core D team having web-conferences as much as they please. It is up to them (and they may already have them?) how they want to communicate. What I argued about was that, just because some antisocial geek argues that conferences are "dead" because we have web-conferencing and similar means of communication does not mean we all share that opinion... Everyone can record a "talk" with slides and put it on some video streaming site like Vimeo or YouTube, but I personally see that as ANOTHER way to reach the community, certainly NOT an alternative to a well-organised conference! Do not get me wrong, I have nothing against the proposal - I think D community can have both good, annual conference, AND what web-conferencing between core D devs, and people who would record talks in their rooms or offices and make them public... While my OP did mention some of those things, it only did so as a way to have _more in-person interaction_ at the two DConf alternative formats I suggested, neither of which was primarily about any of the stuff you mention. At least look at the first two bullet points in my post responding to Adam, because you're missing the entire point of my suggestions, which is that certain things like talks are better suited to online whereas conferences are more suited for in-person interaction.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 11:48:06 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote: I'm sure some thought and planning is now going into the next DConf, so I'd like to make sure people are aware that the conference format that DConf uses is dying off, as explained here: https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era It is a matter of personal preference, and a view of a modern-day geek, in my humble opinion... I _highly disagree_. People go to conferences for different reasons. You know, even though we "computer people" tend to be branded as antisocial, there are still many of us who prefer to see someone in person, talk to him/her, meet new people, speak to them too, build the network, exchange phone numbers, etc... As usual with conferences not all people are happy - you will ALWAYS have people who prefer more technical stuff, and people who prefer more business side - people who try to promote their products and services. - Conferences are brilliant places for them. Another group of people interested in conferences and meetups are recruiters. My company found few new colleagues this way... Yet another group are people who also want to see the town where the conference is held - it is a form of tourism if you like. Yes, you can have all that interaction with some internet-conferencing software, but not at the level when people interact with each other directly! Like most of the responses in this thread, I have no idea why you're stumping for in-person interaction, when all my suggestions were geared around having _more in-person interaction_. If you're still not sure what I mean, read this long post I wrote fisking Adam's similar post: https://forum.dlang.org/post/eoygemytghynpogvl...@forum.dlang.org
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 01:28:37 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: On 10/2/18 4:34 AM, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 09:39:14 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: On 10/1/18 11:26 PM, Joakim wrote: [snip] I disagree. It is not clear what you disagree with, since almost nothing you say has any bearing on my original post. To summarize, I suggest changing the currently talk-driven DConf format to either 1. a more decentralized collection of meetups all over the world, where most of the talks are pre-recorded, and the focus is more on introducing new users to the language or 2. at least ditching most of the talks at a DConf still held at a central location, maybe keeping only a couple panel discussions that benefit from an audience to ask questions, and spending most of the time like the hackathon at the last DConf, ie actually meeting in person. This point has a subtle flaw. Many of the talks raise points of discussion that would otherwise go without discussion, and potentially unnoticed, if it were not for the person bringing it up. The talks routinely serve as a launchpad for the nightly dinner sessions. Benjamin Thauts 2016 talk about shared libraries is one such example. Indeed every single year has brought at least one (but usually more) talk that opened up some new line of investigation for the dinner discussions. I thought it was pretty obvious from my original post, since I volunteered to help with the pre-recorded talks, but the idea is to have pre-recorded talks no matter whether DConf is held in a central location or not. Since both of these alternatives I suggest are much more about in-person interaction, which is what you defend, and the only big change I propose is ditching the passive in-person talks, which you do not write a single word in your long post defending, I'm scratching my head about what you got out of my original post. There is much more to the conference than just a 4-day meetup with talks. The idea that it's just the core 8-15 people with a bunch of hangers-on is patently false. It's not about the conversations I have with the "core" people. It's Schveighoffer, or Atila, or Jonathan, or any of a long list of people who are interested enough in coming. Remember these people self-selected to invest non-trivial treasure to be there, they are ALL worthy of conversing with. Since both my mooted alternatives give _much more_ opportunity for such interaction, I'm again scratching my head at your reaction. This is untrue. See responses further down. It is true. You merely prefer certain interaction for yourself to the overall interaction of the community. Is it a "mini-vaction"? Yea, sure, for my wife. For her it's a four day shopping spree in Europe. For me it's four days of wall-to-wall action that leaves me drop-dead exhausted at the end of the day. So it's the talks that provide this or the in-person interaction? If the latter, why are you arguing against my pushing for more of it and ditching the in-person talks? It's everything. The talks, the coding, the talking, the drinking. All of it has some social component I find valuable. Please try to stay on the subject. Nobody's talking about getting rid of coding/talking/drinking, in fact, the idea is to have _more_ time for those, by ditching the in-person talks. So the relevant info here would be what you find "social" about passively watching a talk in person with 100 other people in the same room, which as usual, you don't provide. Every time I see somebody predicting the end of "X" I roll my eyes. I have a vivid memory of the rise of Skype and videoconferencing in the early 2000's giving way to breathless media reports about how said tools would kill the airlines because people could just meet online for a trivial fraction of the price. People make stupid predictions all the time. Ignoring all such "end of" predictions because many predict badly would be like ignoring all new programming languages because 99% are bad. That means you'd never look at D. And yes, some came true: almost nobody programs minicomputers or buys standalone mp3 players like the iPod anymore, compared to how many used to at their peak. Sure, but the predictions about videoconferencing have yet to come true. As told but the data itself. The travel industry is setting new records yearly in spite of videoconferencing. That's not conjecture or opinion, go look for yourself. As I have previously suggested, the stock prices and order-books of Airbus and Boeing are are record highs. Airplanes are more packed than ever (called load-factor). For example, Delta's system-wide load-factor was 85.6% last year. Which means that 85.6% of all available seats for the entire year were occupied. (Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/221085/passenger-load-factor-of-delta-air-lines/). Airlines are delivering entire planes for business travelers. All of
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 16:10:20 UTC, Johannes Loher wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 15:42:20 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 15:03:45 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: That is what Joakim is talking about - changing the main event to be more like the after-hours stuff everyone loves so much, to actually use all the time to maximize the potential of in-person time. I'm talking about growing two different qualities much more, with my two suggested alternatives to the DConf format. 1. Ditch the talks, focus on in-person interaction. That's why I suggest having almost no talks, whether at a central DConf or not. You clearly agree with this. 2. Decentralize the DConf location, casting a much wider net over many more cities. Walter and Adam could rent a room and setup a Seattle DConf location, Andrei and Steven in Boston, Ali and Shammah in the bay area, and so on (only illustrative, I'm not imposing this on any of these people). Some of the money that went to renting out a large conference room in Munich can instead be spent on these much smaller rooms in each city. Charge some minimal fee for entrance in some locations, if that means they can spend time with W and to cover costs. I wouldn't charge anything more than $2 in my city for my event, as event organizers here have found that that's low enough to keep anyone who's really interested while discouraging fake RSVPs, ie those who have no intent of ever showing up but strangely sign up anyway (I know an organizer who says he had 150 people RSVP for a Meetup here and only 15 showed up). By keeping travel and ticket costs much lower, you invite much more participation. Obviously my second alternative to DConf listed above wouldn't be decentralized at all, only enabling in-person interaction at a still-central DConf. Mix and match as you see fit. I totally agree with you on your first point, i.e. making DConf more interactive. I have had very good experiences with formats like open space or barcamp. However, these formats only work if people are actually willing to participate and bring in their own ideas. Not having anything prepared can in rare cases lead to the situation where there is a lack of things to talk about (I doubt this would be the case for the D community, but it is something to keep in mind). As long as you plan ahead and compile an online list of stuff to work on or discuss in the weeks preceding, I don't see this being a problem. However, I must say I disagree with your second point, i.e. decentralising DConf. As many people here have already mentioned, DConf is about talking to people. And to me it is especially important to talk to lots of different people whom I otherwise don’t get the chance to talk to in person. By decentralising the conference, we would limit the number of different people you can get in touch with directly by a huge amount. I doubt that, it would just be different people you're talking to. There are probably three types of current and potential D users worth talking about. There's the core team, power users, and everybody else, ie casual or prospective users. A central DConf caters to the first two, almost nobody from the largest camp, ie casual/prospective users, is flying out or paying $400 to attend. A decentralized DConf tries to get much more casual/prospective users and power users who couldn't justify traveling so far before, but it has two potential costs: 1. The core team may be spread out and not mostly gathered in one spot anymore. That is why I have suggested having them meet separately from DConf or at one of the DConf locations earlier in this thread. 2. A power user who might have paid to travel to Berlin before doesn't get access to the entire core team at once, someone like you I'm guessing. I think there's some value there, but I suspect it's much less than the value gained from a decentralized DConf. Just to use myself as an example, last Docnf I was able to talk to Andrei, Walter, Mike, Ali, Jonathan, Kai and lots of others and exchange ideas with them. This would not have been possible with a decentralised event (except for the off chance that all those people by chance attend the same local „meetup“). Yes, but what did the D ecosystem concretely get out of it? Is it worth not having the hundreds of people who might have met them at decentralized DConf locations at Boston/SV/Seattle/Berlin not meeting them last year? That's the kind of tough-minded calculation that needs to be made. On the other hand, I have to admit that decentralising the event would open it up for a much bigger audience, which definitely is a good idea. However, I would much prefer to have something like a main DConf and if there are enough interested people in an area who will not go to the main event, they can host their own mini conference and watch streams, make their own small workshops etc. This is
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 15:03:45 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: That is what Joakim is talking about - changing the main event to be more like the after-hours stuff everyone loves so much, to actually use all the time to maximize the potential of in-person time. I'm talking about growing two different qualities much more, with my two suggested alternatives to the DConf format. 1. Ditch the talks, focus on in-person interaction. That's why I suggest having almost no talks, whether at a central DConf or not. You clearly agree with this. 2. Decentralize the DConf location, casting a much wider net over many more cities. Walter and Adam could rent a room and setup a Seattle DConf location, Andrei and Steven in Boston, Ali and Shammah in the bay area, and so on (only illustrative, I'm not imposing this on any of these people). Some of the money that went to renting out a large conference room in Munich can instead be spent on these much smaller rooms in each city. Charge some minimal fee for entrance in some locations, if that means they can spend time with W and to cover costs. I wouldn't charge anything more than $2 in my city for my event, as event organizers here have found that that's low enough to keep anyone who's really interested while discouraging fake RSVPs, ie those who have no intent of ever showing up but strangely sign up anyway (I know an organizer who says he had 150 people RSVP for a Meetup here and only 15 showed up). By keeping travel and ticket costs much lower, you invite much more participation. Obviously my second alternative to DConf listed above wouldn't be decentralized at all, only enabling in-person interaction at a still-central DConf. Mix and match as you see fit.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 14:49:31 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
"Once the videos are all up, set up weekend meetups in several
cities [all over the world], where a few livestreamed talks
may talk place if some speakers don't want to spend more time
producing a pre-recorded talk, but most time is spent like the
hackathon, discussing various existing issues from bugzilla in
smaller groups or brainstorming ideas, designs, and libraries
for the future."
I can setup an event like this in my city, where AFAIK nobody
uses D, so most of it would be geared towards introducing them
to the language.
I estimate that you could do ten times better at raising
awareness and uptake with this approach than the current DConf
format, by casting a much wider net, and it would cost about
10X less, ie you get two orders of magnitude better bang for
the buck.
I think this is something that could be done *in addition to*
DConf.
It depends what you mean by that. If DConf keeps running as it
has, as you suggest below, but you simply add some satellite
meetups around it in other cities watching the livestreamed talks
from the main DConf, then you have addressed some of these
concerns, but not very much.
If you go the decentralized approach I suggested, but maybe pick
one of those locations as the one the core team goes to and don't
do almost any in-person talks anywhere, that would address much
more.
I honestly don't think DConf is very effective at promoting D,
except perhaps to a small sliver of the overall population of
programmers, due to the content of most of the presentations.
I agree. I'll go farther and say that it's a small sliver of
existing D programmers too who get much value out of it.
{This is not intended to be a criticism or a statement that
anything about DConf should be changed.}
Heh, of course it's a criticism and of course it should be
changed. :)
I believe it would be a mistake to drop DConf. If we did that,
the story that would be told is "D couldn't even support its
own conference. Use Rust or Go or Julia instead." Our view
would be "we're on the cutting edge" but everyone else's view
would be "the language is dying".
Great. Everybody thought Apple was nuts when they released a $500
iPhone in 2007, now Ballmer wishes he'd come up with the idea:
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/07/former-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmer-wrong-iphone/
As long as you communicate that you're replacing one DConf
location with several and why you're doing it, I don't see why we
should care how they end up interpreting it. Our goal is to get
users and adoption, not to look good to other
programming-language developers.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 10:37:44 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote: [...] As I'm sure has been said before, if it were just the talks it probably wouldn't be worth it. But conferences are sooo much more than just the talks. Its the conversations over breakfast/lunch/dinner/ between talks and long into the night (sometimes too long). Its the networking, the hacking, the face to face. The talks are usually pretty good too. The conference is definitely not dead, I'm going to one in San José in 2 weeks, sure the talks look really interesting but the main reason is to talk to other people to get stuff done. Then I'm not sure why you're saying any of this to me, as almost nothing you write contradicts anything I wrote. If you're still not sure what I mean, read this long post I just wrote fisking Adam's similar post: https://forum.dlang.org/post/eoygemytghynpogvl...@forum.dlang.org
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 09:39:14 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote: On 10/1/18 11:26 PM, Joakim wrote: [snip] I disagree. It is not clear what you disagree with, since almost nothing you say has any bearing on my original post. To summarize, I suggest changing the currently talk-driven DConf format to either 1. a more decentralized collection of meetups all over the world, where most of the talks are pre-recorded, and the focus is more on introducing new users to the language or 2. at least ditching most of the talks at a DConf still held at a central location, maybe keeping only a couple panel discussions that benefit from an audience to ask questions, and spending most of the time like the hackathon at the last DConf, ie actually meeting in person. Since both of these alternatives I suggest are much more about in-person interaction, which is what you defend, and the only big change I propose is ditching the passive in-person talks, which you do not write a single word in your long post defending, I'm scratching my head about what you got out of my original post. There is much more to the conference than just a 4-day meetup with talks. The idea that it's just the core 8-15 people with a bunch of hangers-on is patently false. It's not about the conversations I have with the "core" people. It's Schveighoffer, or Atila, or Jonathan, or any of a long list of people who are interested enough in coming. Remember these people self-selected to invest non-trivial treasure to be there, they are ALL worthy of conversing with. Since both my mooted alternatives give _much more_ opportunity for such interaction, I'm again scratching my head at your reaction. Is it a "mini-vaction"? Yea, sure, for my wife. For her it's a four day shopping spree in Europe. For me it's four days of wall-to-wall action that leaves me drop-dead exhausted at the end of the day. So it's the talks that provide this or the in-person interaction? If the latter, why are you arguing against my pushing for more of it and ditching the in-person talks? Every time I see somebody predicting the end of "X" I roll my eyes. I have a vivid memory of the rise of Skype and videoconferencing in the early 2000's giving way to breathless media reports about how said tools would kill the airlines because people could just meet online for a trivial fraction of the price. People make stupid predictions all the time. Ignoring all such "end of" predictions because many predict badly would be like ignoring all new programming languages because 99% are bad. That means you'd never look at D. And yes, some came true: almost nobody programs minicomputers or buys standalone mp3 players like the iPod anymore, compared to how many used to at their peak. However, it's 2018 and the airlines are reaping record profits on the backs of business travelers (ask me how I know). Airlines are even now flying planes with NO standard economy seats for routes that cater specifically to business travelers (e.g. Singapore Airlines A350-900ULR). The order books (and stock prices) of both Airbus and Boeing are at historic highs. You know what is much higher? Business communication through email, video-conferencing, online source control, etc. that completely replaced old ways of doing things like business travel or sending physical packages. However, business travel might still be up- I don't know as I haven't seen the stats, and you provide nothing other than anecdotes- because all that virtual communication might have enabled much more collaboration and trade that also grew business travel somewhat. There are more conferences, attendees, and business travelers than there has ever been in history, in spite of the great technological leaps in videoconferencing technology in the past two decades. The market has spoken. Reports of the death of business/conference travel have been greatly exaggerated. You are conflating two completely different markets here, business versus conference travel. Regarding conferences, your experience contradicts that of the iOS devs in the post I linked and the one he links as evidence, where that blogger notes several conferences that have shut down. In your field, it is my understanding that MS has been paring back and consolidating their conferences too, though I don't follow MS almost at all. The reason for this is fundamental to human psychology and, as such, is unlikely to change in the future. Humans are social animals, and no matter how hard we have tried, nothing has been able to replace the face-to-face meeting for getting things done. Be it the conversations we have over beers after the talks, or the epic number of PR's that come out the hackathon, or even mobbing the speaker after a talk. It is funny that you say this on a forum where we're communicating despite never having met "face-to-face," discussing a language where 99.999% of the work is done
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 08:21:11 UTC, maarten van damme wrote: While I have never attended dconf itself, conferences itself usually aren't about the talks but about the people you meet and get to interact with. Since this thread is about replacing the outdated DConf format with two possible in-person formats that feature _more_ interpersonal interaction, I have no idea why you're making this point to me. On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 08:56:36 UTC, bauss wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 07:32:58 UTC, Joakim wrote: Ex. for D conf there is much more than just D. There is also the minor escape from reality to new surroundings, like a mini vacation etc. Thank you for making clear that the real reason you and some others like the current format is because you want to have a fun "vacation"- as I pointed out in that earlier thread- rather than anything to do with D or advancing the ecosystem. Thank you for not reading everything I said and literally only the past 5 words; I said it's also that, but not entirely. Everything you wrote before that I addressed with a separate comment which you didn't cut-n-paste, maybe you missed that too. As for this justification, the only reason you gave is that it's a "escape from reality"/"mini vacation", along with hand-waving about "much more." I can't address reasons you never gave.
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 08:08:38 UTC, Gary Willoughby wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 07:32:58 UTC, Joakim wrote: Thank you for making clear that the real reason you and some others like the current format is because you want to have a fun "vacation"- as I pointed out in that earlier thread- rather than anything to do with D or advancing the ecosystem. Yes, please let's not have any fun at Dconf this year!!! /s Then why are you sitting around listening to boring tech talks on your "super-fun" vacation? Get W and a bunch of other D devs and go on a boat tour of the Greek islands! You'll have a lot more fun!!! endSarcasm()
Re: Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 07:14:54 UTC, bauss wrote: On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 06:26:30 UTC, Joakim wrote: [...] I highly disagree with this. I love conferences and meetups. It's good socially and a conference is not 100% just about the topic it hosts. I think you didn't read what I wrote, as nowhere did I say not to gather people in conferences or meetups, but that the traditional conference _format_, as exemplified by previous DConfs, is a waste of time. Ex. for D conf there is much more than just D. There is also the minor escape from reality to new surroundings, like a mini vacation etc. Thank you for making clear that the real reason you and some others like the current format is because you want to have a fun "vacation"- as I pointed out in that earlier thread- rather than anything to do with D or advancing the ecosystem.
Please don't do a DConf 2018, consider alternatives
I'm sure some thought and planning is now going into the next DConf, so I'd like to make sure people are aware that the conference format that DConf uses is dying off, as explained here: https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era There was a discussion about this in a previous forum thread: https://forum.dlang.org/post/bnbldtdfeppzjuthx...@forum.dlang.org Jonathan and Mike argue in that thread that DConf is great for the core team to get together in person and hash things out for D with very high-bandwidth interaction, but I pointed out that doesn't justify 95%+ of the attendees being there. If there's a real need for this, maybe get those 8-15 people together in an online video conference or offline retreat, without a bunch of hangers-on and talks. People are now experimenting with what replaces conferences, we should be doing that too. I came up with some ideas in that thread: "Have most talks prerecorded by the speaker on their webcam or smartphone, which produce excellent video these days with not much fiddling, and have a couple organizers work with them to get those home-brewed videos up to a certain quality level, both in content and presentation, before posting them online." I volunteer to help presenters do this. "Once the videos are all up, set up weekend meetups in several cities [all over the world], where a few livestreamed talks may talk place if some speakers don't want to spend more time producing a pre-recorded talk, but most time is spent like the hackathon, discussing various existing issues from bugzilla in smaller groups or brainstorming ideas, designs, and libraries for the future." I can setup an event like this in my city, where AFAIK nobody uses D, so most of it would be geared towards introducing them to the language. I estimate that you could do ten times better at raising awareness and uptake with this approach than the current DConf format, by casting a much wider net, and it would cost about 10X less, ie you get two orders of magnitude better bang for the buck. At the very least, DConf should just be a big hackathon of self-organizing groups, rather than wasting any time passively imbibing talks next to a hundred other people. I still don't think the cost of getting a hundred people in the same room for 3-4 days would be justified, but at least it would be a step in the right direction.
Re: Funny way to crash dmd and brick the whole computer
On Friday, 28 September 2018 at 11:58:25 UTC, Zardoz wrote:
CTE fib :
module fib_cte;
import std.stdio;
long fib(long n) {
if (n <= 1) return 1;
return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2);
}
static immutable valueFib = fib(46);
void main() {
writeln(valueFib);
}
I tried it on Android with LDC, it eventually just kills the
process. You need to get a real OS. ;)
Re: DlangUI and android
On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 09:19:52 UTC, Josphe Brigmo wrote: Is there an emulator that can run the apks? Android emulator does not work, I suppose, because it isn't java. Complains about a missing classes.dex file. It isn't clear what you're trying to do: you're trying to run a D apk compiled for ARM in an Android/x86 emulator? That won't work. I'd rather have an emulator version if possible for quicker dev. I've just been trying out the Anbox container for linux, which allows you to run Android apps on the same CPU as your linux distro, so Android/x64 apps on my linux/x64 VPS: https://anbox.io However, 15 modules from Phobos have tests that are failing or segfaulting, as it's the first time I tried Android/x64. I hope to have it working better by the next ldc 1.12 beta, maybe you can try it then. I'll also note that you can get pretty quick turnaround for actual Android hardware by enabling USB debugging or WiFi adb access on your device. But if you need to do some touch or GUI testing with the screen and don't want to manually handle the hardware each time, you'll either have to use an ARM emulator or wait for the Android/x64 support to get better.
Re: Webassembly TodoMVC
On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 19:51:48 UTC, Sebastiaan Koppe wrote: On Saturday, 22 September 2018 at 14:54:29 UTC, aberba wrote: [...] Currently the whole thing is not so developer-friendly, it was just the easiest way for me to get it up and running. [...] Vladimir mentioned that there's a Musl port to wasm, have you tried it? https://github.com/jfbastien/musl Druntime and ldc support Musl.
Re: Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0
On Friday, 21 September 2018 at 20:25:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: When I originally started with D, I thought non-ASCII identifiers with Unicode was a good idea. I've since slowly become less and less enthusiastic about it. First off, D source text simply must (and does) fully support Unicode in comments, characters, and string literals. That's not an issue. But identifiers? I haven't seen hardly any use of non-ascii identifiers in C, C++, or D. In fact, I've seen zero use of it outside of test cases. I don't see much point in expanding the support of it. If people use such identifiers, the result would most likely be annoyance rather than illumination when people who don't know that language have to work on the code. Extending it further will also cause problems for all the tools that work with D object code, like debuggers, disassemblers, linkers, filesystems, etc. To wit, Windows linker error with Unicode symbol: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/pull/2850#issuecomment-422968161 Absent a much more compelling rationale for it, I'd say no. I'm torn. I completely agree with Adam and others that people should be able to use any language they want. But the Unicode spec is such a tire fire that I'm leery of extending support for it. Someone linked this Swift chapter on Unicode handling in an earlier forum thread, read the section on emoji in particular: https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/ I was laughing out loud when reading about composing "family" emojis with zero-width joiners. If you told me that was a tech parody, I'd have believed it. I believe Swift just punts their Unicode support to ICU, like most any other project these days. That's a horrible sign, that you've created a spec so grotesquely complicated that most everybody relies on a single project to not have to deal with it.
Re: Jai compiles 80,000 lines of code in under a second
On Friday, 21 September 2018 at 00:47:27 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote: Of course, D can also take ages to compile one line of code. It all depends on that that line is doing... ctfe and templates are slow. C or Java style code compiling in D is very fast. I was going to say this too, ie how much of that Jai code is run at compile-time, how much is uninstantiated templates that is just skipped over like D does, and how much is templates instantiated many times? Lines of code is not a good enough measure with those programming constructs. I was just building the stdlib tests with LDC yesterday and they took so much memory on a new Linux/x64 VPS with 2GB of RAM that I had spun up that I couldn't even ssh in anymore. I eventually had to restart the VPS and add a swapfile, which I usually have but simply hadn't bothered with yet for this new Ubuntu 18.04 VPS. The stdlib tests instantiate a ton of templates.
dub auto-tester
On Thursday, 20 September 2018 at 04:16:41 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Thursday, 20 September 2018 at 02:51:52 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 01:27:20 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: Not on dlang.org anywhere, but I built a crude version of this. Results are available at http://ikeran.org/report/. A quick status update: And source code is available at https://git.ikeran.org/dhasenan/dubautotester Please don't judge me. Nice, what will it take to get this integrated with the official dub website? BTW, the gitea self-hosted github-workalike you're using looks nice, too bad it's written in Go. ;)
Re: LLVM 7.0.0 no mention of D anymore
On Wednesday, 19 September 2018 at 13:10:07 UTC, Daniel Kozak wrote: http://releases.llvm.org/7.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-projects-using-llvm-7 no mention of D anymore :( http://releases.llvm.org/6.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-projects-using-llvm-6 http://releases.llvm.org/5.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-projects-using-llvm-5 http://releases.llvm.org/4.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#external-open-source-projects-using-llvm-4-0-0 I think Kai used to make sure every LLVM release worked and notified them to mention ldc. I don't he's had time to do much with ldc lately, so maybe it slipped through.
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Tuesday, 18 September 2018 at 18:06:37 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Tuesday, 18 September 2018 at 07:53:31 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 22:27:41 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 15:47:14 UTC, Joakim wrote: Not sure why that matters if you agree with Kay that HTML is an abortion? :) I actually think it's great that mobile is killing off the web, as the Comscore usage stats I linked earlier show. HTML is a somewhat open standard. I'm more happy with HTML and Javascript, as ugly as they are and as dominated by Google and Microsoft as they are, than having to target private companies' frameworks. So you'd rather target an incredibly badly designed open standard than a mostly open source "private company's" framework that's certainly not great, but much better? It's no contest for me, give me the latter any day. And then of course, there's always cross-platform OSS toolkits like Flutter or DlangUI. Thinking about it a bit more, the openness of the platform is more important. Android and iOS are effectively closed platforms. You *can* sideload apps, but it's rare to find someone willing to do so. If you're not on the app stores, your app isn't going to get a thousandth as much traction. I'll note that you wrote "app stores," and for Android there are actually multiple. There's the official Play store from google, the Amazon appstore, app stores for OSS apps like F-Droid or Fossdroid, and over 400 app stores in China, where those first two app stores are almost never used: https://www.appinchina.co/market/app-stores/ Anyone can install any app store on their Android device and get any apps they want, though as you note, most outside China just go with the pre-installed Play or Amazon store. Windows, on the other hand, has long been an open platform; you can develop for it and publish your programs and Microsoft won't get in the way. Though that is now changing with their new UWP platform, which by default must be installed from their own app store, the Microsoft Store. The link for the Windows/AArch64 device in my original post notes that they expect most Windows/AArch64 apps to be UWP apps, and so you'd get them from an app store just like Android most of the time. I read that they do have similar allowances for side-loading UWP apps as Android though, and of course older win32/64 apps on normal Wintel devices isn't affected by this. So an open source cross-platform toolkit controlled by a single entity isn't bad. I use GTK+ a lot, for instance. But the web and HTML is a better situation than Android and iOS and their toolkits. I don't think the app stores are that big a deal as long as side-loading and multiple app stores are always allowed. Of course, that's not the case on iOS, one of the many reasons I've never really used an iOS device.
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 22:27:41 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote: On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 15:47:14 UTC, Joakim wrote: Not sure why that matters if you agree with Kay that HTML is an abortion? :) I actually think it's great that mobile is killing off the web, as the Comscore usage stats I linked earlier show. HTML is a somewhat open standard. I'm more happy with HTML and Javascript, as ugly as they are and as dominated by Google and Microsoft as they are, than having to target private companies' frameworks. So you'd rather target an incredibly badly designed open standard than a mostly open source "private company's" framework that's certainly not great, but much better? It's no contest for me, give me the latter any day. And then of course, there's always cross-platform OSS toolkits like Flutter or DlangUI. On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 23:42:03 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: On Monday, 17 September 2018 at 15:47:14 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:41:41 UTC, tide wrote: On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:11:42 UTC, Joakim wrote: I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7 Might be, but so is trying to convince everyone your predictions are correct so they will focus their work on the issues important to you. Not at all, because if my predictions are correct, this language will disappear along with the PC platform it's built on. And I've never suggested anybody work on anything "important to [me]," my original post even stated that D may never do well on mobile. You are making your arguments to fit your desires. I can't make head nor tails of this claim, you have a talent for vague non sequiturs. My arguments are based on data, the overwhelming sales numbers I linked. I have no idea what desires you think are involved, I suspect you don't either. :) Plateaus almost never happen, it's not the natural order of things. OK the market stabilises. I don't see how you changing the word you used changes anything about the underlying phenomenon: that doesn't happen. You're seriously suggesting that markets never stabilise, say oil prices stay steady for a few years or some such? Prices flit all over the place, that's not what we're talking about. Oil _production_ has been remarkably consistent and growing for many, many decades: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crude_NGPL_IEAtotal_1960-2008.svg The only hiccup was in the early '80s because of extraordinary measures taken by governments, like price controls and cartel orders, which was still only a 15% drop. If oil production ever drops 30% because some workable substitute comes along, as has happened to PCs now, yes, there is no chance of stabilization. It will be a steady decline from there, as these trends have a kind of momentum. Most households have more devices than ever before, and hardware is only getting cheaper. The idea that people will have to choose just one device is plainly wrong. You need to get out in the world a bit more. The majority of smartphones these days are bought in emerging markets where _nobody in their home has ever owned a PC or used the internet_. I've talked to these working stiffs in developing markets, you clearly haven't. And what happens when the emerging markets mature? Do they still just cling on to one smart phone in the house? Or are they yearning for more technology? They buy more mobile devices, the PC will be long since dead and gone. I find it strange that you think the PC won't also be rolled up by mobile like this. Can you put a 3GB hard drive in your phone? Why would I ever want to do this when I noted my phone has 128 GBs of space? ;) If you mean 3 _TB_, yes, I simply attach my slim 1 TB external drive and back up whatever I want over USB 3.0. So you're not averse to having some external hardware sat on your desk. Hmmm. My original post links to examples of using your smartphone connected to a keyboard and monitor or a laptop shell, so I'm not sure where you ever got the idea I was against "external hardware." Or a high end graphics card? Smartphones come with very powerful graphics cards these days, plenty powerful enough to drive lots of graphic loads. Not if you're into high end gaming. The vast majority of PCs don't have cards capable of that either. For the few who want it, there will be specialized solutions, whether consoles or whatever. Or a soundcard with balanced outputs? Some phones come with high-end DACs and the like, or you could always attach something externally if you really needed to. There's no such thing as professional audio breakout box for android AFAIK. Up until a few years ago the problem was Android couldn't do low latency audio, I'm not sure if the situation has changed. If and when that becomes a market that actually matters, somebody will cater to it, just as google optimized the Android video stack for VR a couple years
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:41:41 UTC, tide wrote: On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:11:42 UTC, Joakim wrote: I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7 years is mostly due to the rise of mobile. I think a large part of it is that PCs got fast enough for most people about 7-10 years ago. So it was a combination of mobile, and people no longer needing to get newer faster machines. The upgrade cycle moved from "I need a newer faster computer" to "I'll wait till my current system is worn out". (For a lot of people anyway) Sure, that's part of it, but that suggests that once smartphones reach that performance threshold, they will replace PCs altogether. I think we've reached that threshold now. I feel only looking at sales stats is irrelevant. I know people that have lost their phone and just bought a new phone. They get stolen a lot more easily. If your screen breaks you are better off buying a new phone as the cost of replacing the screen is going to be almost as much as a new one. Someone I know had to fight his boss to repair his phone cause he didn't want a brand new iPhone, he still has an Android device and they switched to Apple a while back. Note, it still costed more to buy the new phone than repair his old one. Computers last much longer, I've had the one I have right now for 8 years. It runs everything I need it to. Faster than a smartphone or tablet, or even most newer laptops still. There's no reason to buy a new one, not that I would buy a prebuilt one anyways. Which I'm pretty sure are what those sales represent. Can't really count a CPU sale as a "PC" sale as it might just be someone upgrading from their old PC. DIY PC sales are estimated at around 50 million a year, they don't move the needle compared to mobile sales. And yes, smartphones get broken easier and need to be upgraded more often, _just as the PC was once a shoddier product than a DEC minicomputer_, as Ken Olsen noted. What _matters_ is that mobile is approaching 10X the sales of PCs. That pays for a lot of innovation and upgrades that the PC base simply cannot pay for: they just don't have the numbers. That is the _same_ way the PC swamped the minicomputer, and mobile is now doing it to the PC. On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 15:49:33 UTC, tide wrote: That is, it is not just the performance that affects the sales of phones. There's a lot of factors that lead to there being new phones sales. Know someone that's gone through 3 phones in comparison to just the one I have. Treadmills eat phones for breakfast. You're conflating my two arguments. Performance has nothing to do with why mobile sells a lot more already, that's all about battery life, mobility, 4G networks, etc. Performance is why mobile's about to kill off the PC too, because it's finally performant enough. On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 22:03:12 UTC, Gambler wrote: You're right about APKs. Not sure whether it changed since I looked into it, or I didn't read the docs correctly in the first place. The overall dev/distribution process, though, still looks... uh, involved compared to compiling and running an executable on PC. I suspect the 10-15 command-line steps listed there to build a GUI app on Android itself are _much less_ work than on any other platform, especially since you don't have to install any big SDK like VS, Xcode, or Qt where plenty of things can go wrong. Of course, it can always be made simpler. In general, I am still convinced of the overall negative effect of mobile devices on computing. They are designed to be used mostly for consumption and social sharing. They have a lot of limitations that currently drag the whole IT ecosystem down. I think you want to cling to that opinion regardless of the evidence. Some excellent high-level criticisms: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now An interesting interview, thanks for the link. Mostly not about mobile, but he seems to think the iPhone was too limiting and should have come with a stylus? Neither critique applies to Android, which is the vast majority of the mobile market, where Termux and the stylus of the Galaxy Note are available, if you want them. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/ He mostly states the obvious, of course touch is not the future of HCI interfaces. He mentions speech as a posibility in the addendum linked at the end, there are people working on it now (I can't believe it's been two years since this article was written): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/google-home-review-a-step-forward-for-hotwords-a-step-backward-in-capability/ That excellent overview notes a problem with discoverability of voice commands in Google Home, so they'll have to come up with a kind of "manpage" for that. ;) As for his preferred haptic approach, it's only really suited for certain kinds of spatial
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 10:25:30 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 04:47:11 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 01:03:27 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have switched to tablets and other mobile devices. Yet PC sales are up this year, mobile is down, and tablet sales have fallen for 3 years in a row. Eh, these are all mostly mature markets now, so slight quarterly dips or gains don't matter much anymore. What does it matter that PC sales were up 2-3% last quarter when 7 times as many smartphones and mobile devices were sold in that same quarter? Some analysts have predicted that PC sales will plateau at some point and if that's where we're at now then 30% drop in shipments is not death of the market. I see no reason why they would plateau, looks like wishful thinking to me. I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7 years is mostly due to the rise of mobile. I think a large part of it is that PCs got fast enough for most people about 7-10 years ago. So it was a combination of mobile, and people no longer needing to get newer faster machines. The upgrade cycle moved from "I need a newer faster computer" to "I'll wait till my current system is worn out". (For a lot of people anyway) Sure, that's part of it, but that suggests that once smartphones reach that performance threshold, they will replace PCs altogether. I think we've reached that threshold now. And just because there's been a trend for 5 or 6 years doesnt mean it will continue so inevitably. Sure, but these trends almost never reverse. ;) It doesnt need to reverse for "the PC is dead" to be false. Plateaus almost never happen, it's not the natural order of things. For example, newspapers hoped their ad revenue had plateaued from 2000-2005, then they plunged: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naa_newspaper_ad_revenue.svg I've predicted that a similar plunge is about to happen to PC sales. I actually think most people would prefer a separate desktop and mobile device, whether that desktop is just the size of pack of cigarettes, or a big box with 5 fans in it. Why? Given how price-sensitive the vast majority of the computing-buying public is- that excludes the Apple sheeple who actually seem to get a hard-on from rising iPhone prices, all the better for them to show how much money they've lucked into by brandishing their "gold" iPhone ;) - I don't see most willing to spend twice on two devices, that could be replaced by just one. Until recently, they didn't have a choice, as you couldn't use your mobile device as a desktop, but the just-released devices I linked in the first post in this thread are starting to change that. Because for about £300 you can get an intel NUC system with 120GB SSD, which is more powerful and more upgradeable than your £700 mobile device. And some people still want that. And because most people have more than one TV, some have multiple phones, phones and tablets, and desktops, and multiple games consoles. And they still use them all in different situations. That's more on the high end, where people use many devices. On the low- to mid-end of the market, where most of the sales happen, people are happy to buy fewer devices that get the job done. This "one device" thing is your preference and you're projecting it onto everyone else. Looks to me like you're the one projecting here. People used to buy standalone mp3 players, GPS devices, point-and-shoot cameras, handheld gaming consoles, etc., etc. Sales of all those standalone devices have been devastated by the smartphone; here's just one example of what happened to camera sales after the smartphone took over, which I've linked on this forum before: https://petapixel.com/2017/03/03/latest-camera-sales-chart-reveals-death-compact-camera/ I find it strange that you think the PC won't also be rolled up by mobile like this. Yes you can bring up examples of people who made mistakes predicting the future but that works both ways. You're just as guilty of seeing a two points and drawing a straight line though them. Except none of these examples or my own prediction are based on simple extrapolation between data points. Rather, we're analyzing the underlying technical details and capabilities and coming to different conclusions about whether the status quo is likely to remain. So I don't think any of us are "guilty" of your charge. Of course you are, you're making predictions and assuming the trends will continue, you assume the technical details are all important. Im saying they are only part of it, that people have requirements / preferences outside of how powerful the device is. Lots of people were predicting ebooks would kill the real book market a
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 01:03:27 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 15:25:55 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick And people don't use PCs for such things? ;) Sure, but they use them for a bunch of other stuff too. My point was that mobile growth has been in the "such things" but barely made a dent in the other stuff. So when you see 30% pc screen time and 70% mobile, its not a 70% drop in actual time spent in front of a PC. It's more a massive growth in time on mobile doing mostly banal pointless crap. Sure, mobile has grown the market for digital entertainment and communication much more than taking away the time spent doing work on a PC, at least so far. I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have switched to tablets and other mobile devices. Yet PC sales are up this year, mobile is down, and tablet sales have fallen for 3 years in a row. Eh, these are all mostly mature markets now, so slight quarterly dips or gains don't matter much anymore. What does it matter that PC sales were up 2-3% last quarter when 7 times as many smartphones and mobile devices were sold in that same quarter? More like when computers first started replacing typewriters, I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :) Im not laughing at the idea of mobile eating into desktop PC share. What Im saying is that it hasnt done so as much as you think. I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7 years is mostly due to the rise of mobile. Not sure what you mean by "it hasnt done so as much as you think." You may argue that most using PCs aren't using them for entertainment, but this drop suggests that at least 30% of them were and have now moved to mobile. And just because there's been a trend for 5 or 6 years doesnt mean it will continue so inevitably. Sure, but these trends almost never reverse. ;) I actually think most people would prefer a separate desktop and mobile device, whether that desktop is just the size of pack of cigarettes, or a big box with 5 fans in it. Why? Given how price-sensitive the vast majority of the computing-buying public is- that excludes the Apple sheeple who actually seem to get a hard-on from rising iPhone prices, all the better for them to show how much money they've lucked into by brandishing their "gold" iPhone ;) - I don't see most willing to spend twice on two devices, that could be replaced by just one. Until recently, they didn't have a choice, as you couldn't use your mobile device as a desktop, but the just-released devices I linked in the first post in this thread are starting to change that. You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life, while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the mainstream market would care about such battery life as much as their early adopters, but they were wrong. But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got his start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC and this was his reaction: "Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it on a table in Olsen’s office. 'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that it was so puny. Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.' Clearly Olsen was wrong." https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/ You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ what people first use the new tool for, what matters is what it _can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is now, as top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to low-end PC CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The x86/x64 PC's days are numbered, just as it once killed off the minicomputer decades ago. Yes you can bring up examples of people who made mistakes predicting the future but that works both ways. You're just as guilty of seeing a two points and drawing a straight line though them. Except none of these examples or my own prediction are based on simple extrapolation between data points. Rather, we're analyzing the underlying technical details and capabilities and coming to different conclusions about whether the status quo is likely to remain. So I don't think any of us are "guilty" of your charge.
Re: A Brief Intro to the SAoC Projects
On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 07:47:46 UTC, Mike Parker wrote: I've posted to the blog a brief introduction to the projects that were selected for the Symmetry Autumn of Code. As the event goes on, I hope to provide more details about the projects and the individuals working on them. The blog: https://dlang.org/blog/2018/09/15/symmetry-autumn-of-code-is-underway/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/9fzrqd/symmetry_autumn_of_code_is_underway/? Proggit post, I think they'll be interested in knowing what was chosen too: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9g2ifo/symmetry_autumn_of_code_is_underway_the_d_blog/
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote: On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote: On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote: On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote: On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote: That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year: This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated. Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats". The usage stats are similarly overwhelming, two-thirds of digital time is spent on mobile, more for the young: Yeah but 90% of the time people spend on mobile is just dicking about. Sending IMs, facebook, point and click games. And thats a huge part of the usage stats, people can now spend more time online wasting time in more situations than ever before. And people don't use PCs for such things? ;) I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have switched to tablets and other mobile devices. PCs are generally seen a tool to accomplish tasks, for word processing or a high end gaming thing, audio / video editing, mobile is more entertainment. Not many people are doing what you are by using your mobile as a desktop. I'm not saying that makes mobile worthless, what I'm saying is that your hypothesis is like saying TV has taken over from typewriters. More like when computers first started replacing typewriters, I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :) You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life, while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the mainstream market would care about such battery life as much as their early adopters, but they were wrong. But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got his start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC and this was his reaction: "Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it on a table in Olsen’s office. 'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that it was so puny. Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.' Clearly Olsen was wrong." https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/ You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ what people first use the new tool for, what matters is what it _can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is now, as top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to low-end PC CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The x86/x64 PC's days are numbered, just as it once killed off the minicomputer decades ago.
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 16:53:16 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On 14 September 2018 at 09:51, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 22:41:31 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On 12 September 2018 at 10:09, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: I think their model of having an open ISA with proprietary extensions will inevitably win out for hardware, just as a similar model has basically won already for software, but that doesn't mean that RISC-V will be the one to do it. Someone else might execute that model better. POWER9 has been making some headway, for instance finally they have a sensible real type (IEEE Quadruple). Though the developers working on glibc support seem to be making a shambles of it, where they want to support both new and old long double types at the same time at run-time! It seems that no one thought about Fortran, Ada, or D when it came to long double support in the C runtime library *sigh*. For us, I think we can choose to ignore the old IBM 128-bit float, and so remove any supporting code from our library, focusing instead only on completing IEEE 128-bit float support (LDC, upstream your local patches before i start naming and shaming you). All the pulls linked from that AArch64 tracker issue above were submitted upstream first before merging into the ldc repo. Only one patch that I know of hasn't been merged upstream yet: my commit to add IEEE Quadruple support to core.internal.convert, only because I want to add another Android commit to that pull soon, but the patch is available in the open druntime pulls. If you know of some other patches that need to be upstreamed, let us know, AFAIK they were all upstreamed first. Can you send me links to any open PR you have? These should not be sitting around for months without merge. That's on me: I had another commit in the works for Android that's mostly working, but put it aside for the ldc 1.11 release, updating the docs on the wiki, and now reworking the Android emulated TLS patch for the upcoming LLVM 7 release. Feel free to use the commit I submitted here a couple months ago or to review it, but I'd like to get that second Android commit in before that pull's merged: https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/2257
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 22:41:31 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote: On 12 September 2018 at 10:09, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote: I think their model of having an open ISA with proprietary extensions will inevitably win out for hardware, just as a similar model has basically won already for software, but that doesn't mean that RISC-V will be the one to do it. Someone else might execute that model better. POWER9 has been making some headway, for instance finally they have a sensible real type (IEEE Quadruple). Though the developers working on glibc support seem to be making a shambles of it, where they want to support both new and old long double types at the same time at run-time! It seems that no one thought about Fortran, Ada, or D when it came to long double support in the C runtime library *sigh*. For us, I think we can choose to ignore the old IBM 128-bit float, and so remove any supporting code from our library, focusing instead only on completing IEEE 128-bit float support (LDC, upstream your local patches before i start naming and shaming you). All the pulls linked from that AArch64 tracker issue above were submitted upstream first before merging into the ldc repo. Only one patch that I know of hasn't been merged upstream yet: my commit to add IEEE Quadruple support to core.internal.convert, only because I want to add another Android commit to that pull soon, but the patch is available in the open druntime pulls. If you know of some other patches that need to be upstreamed, let us know, AFAIK they were all upstreamed first. ARM seems to be taking RISC-V seriously at least (this site was taken down after a couple days if I understand right: http://archive.fo/SkiH0). There is currently a lot of investment going into ARM64 in the server space right now, but signals I'm getting from people working on those projects are that it just doesn't hold water. With one comparison being a high end ARM64 server is no better than a cheap laptop bought 5 years ago. As Kagamin says, it depends on how many cores you're using and what benchmark you run, but most of the time, that's not true at all: https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ And ARM does it with much less electric power used, as shown in that last graph, which you have to take into account when looking at the total costs. The ARM blog post I linked earlier in this thread shows they've gone ahead with using ARM too. RISC-V got accepted into gcc-7, and runtime made it into glibc 2.27, there's certainly a lot effort being pushed for it. They have excellent simulator support on qemu, porting druntime only took two days. Patches for RISCV64 will come soon, probably with some de-duplication of large blocks. Great, but it's still in very nascent stages, with linux only running on it this year. I thought about using Qemu but figured the slowness and possible hardware compatibility issues weren't worth it. I hope some open arch like these takes off sometime soon, as I don't like an ARM monopoly much better than the previous Intel one, but it's going to take awhile for POWER/RISC-V to get anywhere close.
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote: On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote: On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote: That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year: This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated. Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats". The usage stats are similarly overwhelming, two-thirds of digital time is spent on mobile, more for the young: https://www.searchforce.com/blog/the-comscore-u-s-mobile-app-report-2017/ I went all-mobile three years ago, haven't looked back.
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 15:38:36 UTC, Joakim wrote: the world is right now? It's not IBM, Apple, Whoops, meant to write Intel here, but wrote Apple again. :D
Re: Mobile is the new PC and AArch64 is the new x64
On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 06:41:38 UTC, Gambler wrote: On 9/10/2018 9:43 AM, Joakim wrote: Yes, I know, these devices won't replace your quad-core Xeon workstation with 32-64 GBs of RAM anytime soon, but most people don't need anywhere near that level of compute. That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year: I'm all for supporting modern open CPU architectures. At the same time, I fear that the specific trend you're describing here (people ditching PCs for cellphones/tablets) is effectively a reversal of the PC revolution. For the last 30+ years people benefited from "trickle down computing". They had access to PCs that were equivalent to cutting edge servers of 6-7 years prior. They had ability to choose their operating system, expand and upgrade their hardware and install any software they wanted. All of this is breaking down right now. Yes and no, it is true that that is the way tech _used_ to diffuse. However, do you know what the largest tech company in the world is right now? It's not IBM, Apple, HP, or Microsoft, ie none of the server or PC companies. It's Apple, which doesn't sell into the server or traditional enterprise markets almost at all and only has 15-20% unit share in the mobile market. In other words, consumer tech markets are _much_ larger than the server/enterprise markets that used to lead tech R, which means consumer tech like mobile is what leads the way now. As for choosing your own OS, that's still possible, but as always, it can be tough to get drivers for your hardware: https://together.jolla.com/question/136143/wiki-available-devices-running-sailfish-os/ And if you simply want to tinker with the Android OS on your device, there are many ways to do that: https://www.xda-developers.com/how-to-install-custom-rom-android/ No need to expand and upgrade your hardware when prices keep dropping in this Darwinian market. There's now a $500 phone with a faster chip than the one I got just 7 months back for $700: https://m.newegg.com/products/N82E16875220078 As for installing any software you want, Android allows it: it's how I debug the apps I build on my phone or tablet. The iPhone doesn't, but it's a minority of the mobile market. Intel got lazy without competition and high-end CPU architectures stagnated. All the cutting-edge computing is done on NVidia cards today. It requires hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, tens of terabytes of data and usage of specialized computing libraries. I very much doubt this will "trickle down" to mobile in foreseeable future. Heck, most developer laptops today have no CUDA capabilities to speak of. I question the need for such "cutting-edge computing" in the first place, but regardless, it has already moved down to mobile and other edge devices: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/the-pixel-2-contains-a-custom-google-soc-the-pixel-visual-core/ https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17616140/google-edge-tpu-on-device-ai-machine-learning-devkit Moreover, mobile devices are locked down by default and it's no trivial task to break out of those walled gardens. IIRC, Apple has an official policy of not allowing programming tools in their app store. Alan Kay had to personally petition Steve Jobs to allow Scratch to be distributed, so kids could learn programming. I believe the general policy is still in place. They have their own app for that now: https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ Android is better, but it's still a horror to do real work on, compared to any PC OS. Fine, you rooted it, installed some compilers and so on. How will you share your software with fellow Android users? You seem to have missed all the posts I've made here before about native Android support for ldc: :) _I have never rooted any of my Android devices_. Compiling D code on most any Android device is as simple as installing an app from the official Play Store and typing a single command, `apt install ldc`: https://wiki.dlang.org/Build_D_for_Android The instructions there even show you how to package up an Android GUI app, an apk, on Android itself, by using some other packages available in that Android app. In essence, we are seeing the rapid widening of two digital divides. The first one is between users and average developers. The second one is between average developers and researchers at companies like Google. I very much doubt that we will see an equivalent of today's high-end machine learning server on user's desk, let alone in anyone's pocket, within 7 years. I disagree on both counts. First off, people were running supercomputers and UNIX workstations while you were piddling along on your PC decades ago. That changed nothing about what you were able to learn and accomplish on your PC. In fact, you were probably much better off than they were, as the PC skills you picked up were likely in much more demand than their supercomputing
