On Friday, 19 January 2024 at 18:52:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I get a constant stream of requests for attention. There's only so much I can respond to. Adding another source will likely just make me less productive.

In Linux world, the leads just review and merge. It is difficult to both be the main compiler developer and also the project lead who must review PRs.

On Friday, 19 January 2024 at 15:05:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> ..
> ImportC is not a language change, and so did not require a DIP. ... It had no impact on anyone who wasn't interested in it.
> ...
> ...
> ... A good proxy for how useful a feature is is the quantity of bugzilla issues submitted, and ImportC has had a lot of them! (317 submitted, 274 resolved)

A feature pulled in, essentially without any community involvement at the time, has resulted in 317+ bugs being summitted, and in addition, peoples time (perhaps mostly yours) spent resolving at least 274 of them.

And you're justification is.. "ImportC is not a language change, and so did not require a DIP."

As a developer in the team at my business, if you had done this, then you would have been promptly shown the door.

btw. None of the above is a comment about the usefulness of ImportC, or not. It's about the impact of change that was never presented to the community before it got pulled.

And those that pulled it are as much to blame.

Would such a thing still occur today? (that is a question I don't know the answer to).

On 1/27/2024 8:20 PM, FairEnough wrote:
> A feature pulled in, essentially without any community involvement at the time, has resulted in 317+ bugs being summitted, and in addition, peoples time (perhaps mostly yours) spent resolving at least 274 of them.

Those issues were about ImportC, not the rest of the compiler. As compilers go, this is a remarkably small number.

As for the time, it is mine to spend as I see fit. Nobody is paying me.


> And you're justification is.. "ImportC is not a language change, and so did not require a DIP."

Phobos additions don't require a DIP. Code gen improvements do not. Dub does not. C++ header file generation did not. Druntime changes do not. Build system does not. Infrastructure does not. Web site changes do not. And so on. Only language changes involve a DIP.


> As a developer in the team at my business, if you had done this, then you would have been promptly shown the door.

I've done bootleg projects at the companies I've worked at. They were all eventually mainlined into the official products.


> btw. None of the above is a comment about the usefulness of ImportC, or not.

It's fair to consider the result. ImportC elicited more or less no interest from anybody. I expected that. Over time, though, its detractors who have tried it have found it to be a game-changing time saver. ImportC is a huge win for D.

I've implemented a C compiler before, and knew ImportC was going to work. In fact, it worked much better than I anticipated.


> It's about the impact of change that was never presented to the community before it got pulled.

As a proposal, it was not. As a prototype, it was, it just was pulled shortly thereafter.


> And those that pulled it are as much to blame.

The fellow that pulled it, Atila, is the author of dpp, a program to import C headers to D. Atila understood the potential of ImportC, probably better than anyone else.


> Would such a thing still occur today? (that is a question I don't know the answer to).

I thought many times about doing an ImportC++, but ran away screaming. Maybe ImportCwithClasses :-)

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 05:29:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> I thought many times about doing an ImportC++, but ran away screaming. Maybe ImportCwithClasses :-)

One funny thing... C doesn't even need classes. It only needs UFCS.

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 04:20:12 UTC, FairEnough wrote:
> On Friday, 19 January 2024 at 15:05:28 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> ..
>> ImportC is not a language change, and so did not require a DIP. ... It had no impact on anyone who wasn't interested in it.
>> ...
>> ...
>> ... A good proxy for how useful a feature is is the quantity of bugzilla issues submitted, and ImportC has had a lot of them! (317 submitted, 274 resolved)
>
> A feature pulled in, essentially without any community involvement at the time, has resulted in 317+ bugs being summitted, and in addition, peoples time (perhaps mostly yours) spent resolving at least 274 of them.
>
> And you're justification is.. "ImportC is not a language change, and so did not require a DIP."
>
> As a developer in the team at my business, if you had done this, then you would have been promptly shown the door.
>

But this where you get it wrong. This is not a business. The thing about D is that everyone works on what they want to work on. and its perfectly valid for Walter to work on whatever motivates him.

It took me a while to grasp this about the D eco-system, but its key to getting your expectations right. If you want a business like focused approach that managed top-down, this is not it.

On Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 11:23:45 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:

> But this where you get it wrong. This is not a business. The thing about D is that everyone works on what they want to work on. and its perfectly valid for Walter to work on whatever motivates him.
>

I don't know if I am right but part of the motivation of import C seems to have been competition - Zig added the ability to compile C. It seems the idea of import C came up after and maybe as a consequence of this.

On 1/28/2024 4:41 AM, ryuukk_ wrote:
> And i thank you a lot for ImportC, just last week it saved me a ton of time
> 
> I needed a voronoi library for some proc-gen, i could have wrote it myself but would take me too long, so instead went to C land, and simply just imported this library:
> 
> https://github.com/JCash/voronoi
> 
> ```c
> #define JC_VORONOI_IMPLEMENTATION
> #include "jc_voronoi.h"
> ```
> 
> And in D:
> 
> ```d
> import jc_voronoi;
> ```
> 
> And voila, everything works out of the box

Your post makes me happy! Thank you for letting me know this.

On 1/28/2024 3:27 AM, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> I don't know if I am right but part of the motivation of import C seems to have been competition - Zig added the ability to compile C. It seems the idea of import C came up after and maybe as a consequence of this.

I didn't know Zig did that until after I did ImportC.