On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 16:16:10 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 2/12/14, 12:34 AM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>> The thing is, we do almost have it, because it's not a huge thing to
>> implement.  Low hanging fruit vs long-term priorities.
>
> There's this thing in psychology - when confronted with too many unprioritized tasks, people will consistently choose the easiest ones.

Yep.  When overwhelmed, it's particularly welcome to be making quantifiable progress on something.  Anything.  And in many cases it really is worth interspersing the easy tasks with the hard ones just to keep morale up, even if those easy tasks are really not terribly important from a priorities perspective.  Of course, the flip-side of that is feature creep, when too much time is spent on the low-priority easy stuff.  I think every programmer needs to learn this balance at some point, as an aid to avoiding burnout.

On 2/12/14, 8:49 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 16:16:10 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 2/12/14, 12:34 AM, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>>> The thing is, we do almost have it, because it's not a huge thing to
>>> implement.  Low hanging fruit vs long-term priorities.
>>
>> There's this thing in psychology - when confronted with too many
>> unprioritized tasks, people will consistently choose the easiest ones.
>
> Yep.  When overwhelmed, it's particularly welcome to be making
> quantifiable progress on something.  Anything.  And in many cases it
> really is worth interspersing the easy tasks with the hard ones just to
> keep morale up, even if those easy tasks are really not terribly
> important from a priorities perspective.  Of course, the flip-side of
> that is feature creep, when too much time is spent on the low-priority
> easy stuff.  I think every programmer needs to learn this balance at
> some point, as an aid to avoiding burnout.

There's always answering email and posting to forums :o).

Andrei

On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 16:30:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I convinced Walter of my view on this, so he won't work on it. I trust that at least between the two of us we can focus on working on what matters most first.
>
> Andrei

Cruel world :)

On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 16:30:29 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I convinced Walter of my view on this, so he won't work on it. I trust that at least between the two of us we can focus on working on what matters most first.
>
> Andrei

Thank god! Splintering the community, causing confusion and diverting effort between these would of been a nightmare for the popularity and up-take of D, especially as real interest is starting to be shown from across the board. Plus, there's no real reason why after the allocator/arc/gc changes are made D will be able to fill this niche itself.

I had nightmares of a new Phobos/Tango war being created for small D. :/

On 02/12/2014 11:30 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I convinced Walter of my view on this, so he won't work on it. I trust
> that at least between the two of us we can focus on working on what
> matters most first.
>

Too busy to innovate! ;)

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 21:13:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 2/11/2014 12:37 PM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
>
> The idea is it would not require any library other than the C runtime.

This somehow reminds me of the first C++ compiler, which generated C.

I quite like the idea.

Steve

On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 16:49:46 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
> Yep.  When overwhelmed, it's particularly welcome to be making quantifiable progress on something.  Anything.  And in many cases it really is worth interspersing the easy tasks with the hard ones just to keep morale up, even if those easy tasks are really not terribly important from a priorities perspective.  Of course, the flip-side of that is feature creep, when too much time is spent on the low-priority easy stuff.  I think every programmer needs to learn this balance at some point, as an aid to avoiding burnout.

Yep we need to finish and polish what we have before adding anything new. There are so many long term important bugs still not fixed. https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=314

On 2014-02-11 20:43, Walter Bright wrote:
> I've toyed with this idea for a while, and wondered what the interest
> there is in something like this.
>
> The idea is to be able to use a subset of D that does not require any of
> druntime or phobos - it can be linked merely with the C standard
> library. To that end, there'd be a compiler switch (-betterC) which
> would enforce the subset.
>
> (First off, I hate the name "better C", any suggestions?)

-no-runtime

> The subset would disallow use of any features that rely on:
>
> 1. moduleinfo
> 2. exception handling
> 3. gc
> 4. Object
>
> I've used such a subset before when bringing D up on a new platform, as
> the new platform didn't have a working phobos.
>
> What do you think?

I don't mind it.

Funny thing tough: complaining that warnings are not good because they would create a separate language. Then I see this proposal.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 20:10:42 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> (First off, I hate the name "better C", any suggestions?)
>
> -no-runtime

good choice and even if Walter is blocked on higher prio issues, we can still make it happen as a community.

On 2/12/14, 9:20 AM, Gary Willoughby wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 February 2014 at 16:49:46 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Yep.  When overwhelmed, it's particularly welcome to be making
>> quantifiable progress on something.  Anything.  And in many cases it
>> really is worth interspersing the easy tasks with the hard ones just
>> to keep morale up, even if those easy tasks are really not terribly
>> important from a priorities perspective. Of course, the flip-side of
>> that is feature creep, when too much time is spent on the low-priority
>> easy stuff.  I think every programmer needs to learn this balance at
>> some point, as an aid to avoiding burnout.
>
> Yep we need to finish and polish what we have before adding anything
> new. There are so many long term important bugs still not fixed.
> https://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=314

Hasn't Kenji fixed that?

Andrei