August 26, 2010
Justin Johansson wrote:
> A lot of people will be pleased to
> see 64-bit D.

64 bit has been pushed aside for around 7 years now in favor of more urgent matters. It's time to get it done.
August 26, 2010
Walter Bright wrote:
> bearophile wrote:
>> This is why I don't like a lot the current work done for the 64 bit
>> implementation.
> 
> A lot of groups cannot consider D unless it supports 64 bit compilation.
> 
> 
>> D2 has some design problems (I don't call them 'enhancement
>> requests') that if you want to fix may require to break backward
>> compatibility (they are things that can't just be added to the D2 language),
>> few months ago I have listed about ten of them here (and I think Walter did
>> just ignore them),
> 
> 71 bugzilla issues were resolved just in the last update. I don't think it's quite fair to characterize the ongoing development as ignoring the community. You list several things *per day*. I doubt any organization could keep up with the sheer volume of your output <g>. I'm not suggesting that you stop doing it, quite the contrary. I just hope you can be realistic about how much can be done about them in the short term.

Since February, 30% of bugzilla entries are from bearophile!
It's really impressive.
August 26, 2010
Walter Bright wrote:
> Justin Johansson wrote:
>> A lot of people will be pleased to
>> see 64-bit D.
> 
> 64 bit has been pushed aside for around 7 years now in favor of more urgent matters. It's time to get it done.

Also, I think it's critical to be certain there's nothing in the language which is incompatible with 64 bits. It's bound to flush out a lot of hidden bugs.
August 26, 2010
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Don <nospam@nospam.com> wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> Justin Johansson wrote:
>>>
>>> A lot of people will be pleased to
>>> see 64-bit D.
>>
>> 64 bit has been pushed aside for around 7 years now in favor of more urgent matters. It's time to get it done.
>
> Also, I think it's critical to be certain there's nothing in the language which is incompatible with 64 bits. It's bound to flush out a lot of hidden bugs.
>

Or in phobos, like std.stream.OutputStream.write(char[]) (and the
associated read(char[])).
It writes a size_t with the length of the following char-array.
Considering that this is even used on the network (with SocketStream)
this might lead to problems (write on amd64 and read on i386 or the
other way round).
I'd suggest to always write the length as a (u)long - or uint,
char-arrays/strings that are bigger than 4GB are just insane, anyway.
(Java uses short in a similar method, IIRC).
August 26, 2010
Daniel Gibson:
> I'd suggest to always write the length as a (u)long - or uint,
> char-arrays/strings that are bigger than 4GB are just insane, anyway.
> (Java uses short in a similar method, IIRC).

A "long" suffices there, no need to use a "cent".

Bye,
bearophile
August 27, 2010
On 26/08/10 07:57, Don wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> bearophile wrote:
>>> This is why I don't like a lot the current work done for the 64 bit
>>> implementation.
>>
>> A lot of groups cannot consider D unless it supports 64 bit compilation.
>>
>>
>>> D2 has some design problems (I don't call them 'enhancement
>>> requests') that if you want to fix may require to break backward
>>> compatibility (they are things that can't just be added to the D2
>>> language),
>>> few months ago I have listed about ten of them here (and I think
>>> Walter did
>>> just ignore them),
>>
>> 71 bugzilla issues were resolved just in the last update. I don't
>> think it's quite fair to characterize the ongoing development as
>> ignoring the community. You list several things *per day*. I doubt any
>> organization could keep up with the sheer volume of your output <g>.
>> I'm not suggesting that you stop doing it, quite the contrary. I just
>> hope you can be realistic about how much can be done about them in the
>> short term.
>
> Since February, 30% of bugzilla entries are from bearophile!
> It's really impressive.

I kind of started thinking of Bearophile as the conscience of the newsgroup a while back ;-) Always sitting on your shoulder pointing out how things should be better or could be fixed. He really is a tireless user advocate!

As for the current directly, I think the most critical matter is bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes, which is why I was pleased to see that last changelog. It's disheartening to run headlong into a language bug every time I code something in D2.
October 05, 2010
On 26/08/2010 02:25, bearophile wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis
>
>> If D2's user base really increases like we'd like it to (and TDPL should help a lot with
>> that), it's going to cost users a lot more when backwards compatability is
>> broken.
>
> This is why I don't like a lot the current work done for the 64 bit implementation. D2 has some design problems (I don't call them 'enhancement requests') that if you want to fix may require to break backward compatibility (they are things that can't just be added to the D2 language), few months ago I have listed about ten of them here (and I think Walter did just ignore them), and probably few more are present (and one or two of them in the meantime have officially become 'things to fix', like the syntax for array ops that I think now officially requires obligatory [], this was one of the things in my list of little breaking changes). I'd like those problems to be fixed (or specs to take them in account, even if the compiler implementation isn't yet up to date to them) before people start using D2 and breaking backwards compatibility becomes a pain. Otherwise they risk never being fixed.
>
> Implementation matters come after design matters if you impose the constraint of keeping backwards compatibility.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

I don't see how "fixing design problems that [..] break backward compatibility" is that much of an issue for the 64 bit implementation. Unless it's a really big design change (which then I would doubt would be accepted), what kind of D design changes would really invalidate a significant amount of work done on a 64bit compiler backend implementation?


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
October 05, 2010
On 27/08/2010 03:01, Gareth Charnock wrote:
> On 26/08/10 07:57, Don wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> bearophile wrote:
>>>> This is why I don't like a lot the current work done for the 64 bit
>>>> implementation.
>>>
>>> A lot of groups cannot consider D unless it supports 64 bit compilation.
>>>
>>>
>>>> D2 has some design problems (I don't call them 'enhancement
>>>> requests') that if you want to fix may require to break backward
>>>> compatibility (they are things that can't just be added to the D2
>>>> language),
>>>> few months ago I have listed about ten of them here (and I think
>>>> Walter did
>>>> just ignore them),
>>>
>>> 71 bugzilla issues were resolved just in the last update. I don't
>>> think it's quite fair to characterize the ongoing development as
>>> ignoring the community. You list several things *per day*. I doubt any
>>> organization could keep up with the sheer volume of your output <g>.
>>> I'm not suggesting that you stop doing it, quite the contrary. I just
>>> hope you can be realistic about how much can be done about them in the
>>> short term.
>>
>> Since February, 30% of bugzilla entries are from bearophile!
>> It's really impressive.
>
> I kind of started thinking of Bearophile as the conscience of the
> newsgroup a while back ;-) Always sitting on your shoulder pointing out
> how things should be better or could be fixed. He really is a tireless
> user advocate!
>
> As for the current directly, I think the most critical matter is
> bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes, which is why I was pleased to see that
> last changelog. It's disheartening to run headlong into a language bug
> every time I code something in D2.

I don't know about the rest of people here in the NG, but actually I would hope bearophile would post much less often, especially when its him creating a new thread. And that's simply because he posts way too often, with lots of detail, and it takes a lot of time to read up on all that content, and to think about it with some depth.
My default behavior with threads created by bearophile is just to skim or skip them over altogether. And it has nothing to do with quality of what bearophile says, because actually I think he often makes good points and brings good insights... but there are just *way* too many of them :P (not to mention the huge stream of links to articles on other sites that often accompany bearophile's posts)

So yeah, bearophile, that's my plea. :-o Some of us like to sleep the recommended number of hours...

-- 
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
October 05, 2010
On Tue, 05 Oct 2010 19:30:59 +0400, Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+spam@com.gmail> wrote:

> On 27/08/2010 03:01, Gareth Charnock wrote:
>> On 26/08/10 07:57, Don wrote:
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> bearophile wrote:
>>>>> This is why I don't like a lot the current work done for the 64 bit
>>>>> implementation.
>>>>
>>>> A lot of groups cannot consider D unless it supports 64 bit compilation.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> D2 has some design problems (I don't call them 'enhancement
>>>>> requests') that if you want to fix may require to break backward
>>>>> compatibility (they are things that can't just be added to the D2
>>>>> language),
>>>>> few months ago I have listed about ten of them here (and I think
>>>>> Walter did
>>>>> just ignore them),
>>>>
>>>> 71 bugzilla issues were resolved just in the last update. I don't
>>>> think it's quite fair to characterize the ongoing development as
>>>> ignoring the community. You list several things *per day*. I doubt any
>>>> organization could keep up with the sheer volume of your output <g>.
>>>> I'm not suggesting that you stop doing it, quite the contrary. I just
>>>> hope you can be realistic about how much can be done about them in the
>>>> short term.
>>>
>>> Since February, 30% of bugzilla entries are from bearophile!
>>> It's really impressive.
>>
>> I kind of started thinking of Bearophile as the conscience of the
>> newsgroup a while back ;-) Always sitting on your shoulder pointing out
>> how things should be better or could be fixed. He really is a tireless
>> user advocate!
>>
>> As for the current directly, I think the most critical matter is
>> bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes, which is why I was pleased to see that
>> last changelog. It's disheartening to run headlong into a language bug
>> every time I code something in D2.
>
> I don't know about the rest of people here in the NG, but actually I would hope bearophile would post much less often, especially when its him creating a new thread. And that's simply because he posts way too often, with lots of detail, and it takes a lot of time to read up on all that content, and to think about it with some depth.
> My default behavior with threads created by bearophile is just to skim or skip them over altogether. And it has nothing to do with quality of what bearophile says, because actually I think he often makes good points and brings good insights... but there are just *way* too many of them :P (not to mention the huge stream of links to articles on other sites that often accompany bearophile's posts)
>
> So yeah, bearophile, that's my plea. :-o Some of us like to sleep the recommended number of hours...
>

No way! Just don't read his posts if you are not interested.
October 05, 2010
Bruno Medeiros <brunodomedeiros+spam@com.gmail> wrote:

> I don't know about the rest of people here in the NG, but actually I would hope bearophile would post much less often, especially when its him creating a new thread. And that's simply because he posts way too often, with lots of detail, and it takes a lot of time to read up on all that content, and to think about it with some depth.
> My default behavior with threads created by bearophile is just to skim or skip them over altogether. And it has nothing to do with quality of what bearophile says, because actually I think he often makes good points and brings good insights... but there are just *way* too many of them :P (not to mention the huge stream of links to articles on other sites that often accompany bearophile's posts)

Understandable, but bearophile's threads are often among the most
interesting ones I feel, and well worth staying up late for.


> So yeah, bearophile, that's my plea. :-o Some of us like to sleep the recommended number of hours...

That I've given up on a long time ago.

-- 
Simen