On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 11:37:51AM +0000, bearophile via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Walter Bright:
> 
> >On 11/28/2014 3:50 PM, bearophile wrote:
> >>I agree. D has to come back to the living. It looks like D is hibernating.
> >
> >I have no idea what you're talking about.
> 
> In the last several years the development of D/Phobos didn't keep a constant speed (and this is normal), I have seen sprints, slowdowns, etc.
> 
> In the latest months I'm seeing a reduction of activity both on the language side, on the fixing and merging of important Phobos patches, and even regarding the number of interesting discussions in the main D newsgroup.

Huh??! I *really* don't know what you're talking about, because in the last few months, I've seen a dramatic *increase* in Phobos activity. We've seen the PR queue shrink from 95+ to the mid 30's within 1-2 months, and recently there's been a whole bunch of PR's that got merged (Ilya's import cleanups, for example, span almost all of Phobos and got merged within days of each submission), plus a bunch of new features coming in so fast that the queue is growing again since the committers haven't been able to keep up with the pace. There has been Igor's extremely critical work on finally prepping the AA implementation to be implementable in the library, which is almost reaching its final stages now. If anything, I'd say D is waking up, rather than hibernating!

Judging language progress by forum discussions is unreliable... if anything, in *my* experience there's a rather low S/N ratio on the forum in terms of what actually gets done. Perhaps more people have clued in to the fact that asking for things on the forums doesn't work so well, and have started to submit PR's instead? ;-)


[...]
> Or perhaps I'm just mis-measuring the kind of D activity, and everything is going on as well as usual :-)
[...]

How are you measuring D activity? Forum activity is unreliable. Did you look at github commit statistics?


T

-- 
Too many people have open minds but closed eyes.

On Sat, Nov 29, 2014 at 12:41:45AM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 11/28/2014 6:08 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >Hmm. Did you install libncurses5-dev (or libncursesw5-dev)? If not, try
> >`apt-get install libncurses5-dev` (or libncursesw5-dev as appropriate).
> >Otherwise, try -lncurses5 or -lncursesw5, perhaps?
> 
> Yeah, that didn't work, either.
> 
> I wound up simply ripping out ncurses and hardcoding it for xterm.

Haha... obviously you haven't seen Adam Ruppe's excellent terminal.d library:

	https://github.com/adamdruppe/arsd

I used it for a few of my own projects, and it's pretty awesome. Not perfect, mind you, but it does work pretty well for common terminals like xterm (or whatever termcap entries it can parse). I highly recommend it.


T

-- 
Elegant or ugly code as well as fine or rude sentences have something in common: they don't depend on the language. -- Luca De Vitis

On 11/29/14, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> Just for fun, I've decided to try and get MicroEmacs in D added to the dub registry. The last time it compiled was 2 years ago.

You seem to create this kind of thread every other month. People complaint to you about A and B, you ignore it, and then when it hits you *personally* suddenly it's a shock to you.

The fact that you think you're going to get symbol suggestions for 2 year old code just shows how out of touch you are with the development process. We have a deprecation stage, and a removal stage. There's no way you're going to get suggestions for missing symbols for code that references those symbols which existed 2 years ago.

/rant-mode activated

H. S. Teoh:

> Huh??! I *really* don't know what you're talking about, because in the
> last few months, I've seen a dramatic *increase* in Phobos activity.

OK, if I was mistaken then I am happy ::) Sometimes it's good to be wrong.

Bye,
bearophile

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 07:17:48 UTC, weaselcat wrote:
<snip> IMO rust got it right
> with immutable by default, but hindsight is grand(To be fair, rust lifetime management is really ugly too)

Immutable as default sounds good (in core)

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 11:59:36 UTC, bearophile wrote:
<snip>
>
>> and the lack of a rich set of libraries because of bit rot.
>
> This is not a valid argument. The lack of D libraries has various causes, probably the main one is the lack of D developers and the lack of their interest in keeping the code updated (perhaps because they have left D community?). <snip>

ouch.

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 02:59:07 UTC, Mike wrote:
<snip>
>
>> and the lack of a rich set of libraries because of bit rot.
>
> Yes, D's current business model is not sustainable.  It is lacking capable contributors and funds to keep the code maintained.
>
> Mike

Agree.

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 11:35:52 UTC, Paolo Invernizzi
wrote:
> On Friday, 28 November 2014 at 23:33:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> I know there's been a lot of "break my code" advocacy lately, but this code was only 2 years old.
>
> I've lost my faith in expecting to see the D core team grasp what the so called "break my code" folks aims to reach.
>
> --
> Paolo

Yup.

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 11:56:31 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
<snip>
>
> I got very happy when Walter announced "@nogc" and his intent to create a "better C" switch on the compiler.
>
> I felt this was a nice change of direction, but I also feel that this direction has stagnated and taken a turn for the worse with the ref-counting focus… Phobos is too much of a scripting-language library to me, too much like Tango, and hacking in ref counting makes it even more so.
>
> To me, a "better C" would have a minimal runtime, a tight minimalistic standard library and very simple builtin ownership semantics (uniqe_ptr). Then a set of supporting libraries that are hardware-optimized (with varying degree of portability).
>
<snip>

agree.

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 14:40:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
<snip>
>
> With a big standard library you get this effect:
>
> big monolithic standard library -> other libraries build on it -> many libraries are unsuitable for more restricted applications
>
> big monolithic standard library -> hard to keep bug free, performant and makes language changes more difficult
>
> What you want is this:
>
> tight standard library -> other libraries build on it if they can-> more libraries are suitable for all applications
>
> tight standard library -> high degree of stability -> less breakage of other libraries
>
> tight standard library -> better results for library-aware optimizations
>
> <snip>

+1

>
>> Clearly D is not a "better C", it's a "better C++/Java". You can use D as a "better C" but this needs some adaptation, both for you and the libraries.
>
><snip>

It is a bit of false advertising to on website promote D as better C, when the efforts are that it is a better C++/Java/CLR.

(and I think you can do both w/ a split).