December 10, 2011
On 12/10/11 2:22 PM, maarten van damme wrote:
> yes please.
> I've read the book "the d programming language" and got all excited
> until I actually tried using std.algorithm. (d made up for it pretty soon).
> It are the huge problems that prevent people for trying a language but
> it are those little things that scare them back away.

Thanks for confirming my long held suspicion.

> And I've also been a bit disappointed in the d way of doing things (it's
> easy to write good code but hard is always possible).

Could you rephrase that? I don't understand.

> Just for fun I
> wanted to create a program as little as possible, compiled without
> garbage collector/phobos/... and it turned out that compiling without
> garbage collector is pretty much impossible (memory leaks all around the
> place in druntime). dynamic linking for the d standard library would be
> a great new option for a dmd release in the future :).

Using D without GC is an interesting direction, and dynamic linking should be available relatively soon.


Andrei
December 10, 2011
On 12/10/11 2:28 PM, Gour wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:35:13 -0500
> bearophile<bearophileHUGS@lycos.com>  wrote:
>
>> I suggest to release the nearly done 2.057 and leave those issues to
>> 2.058 and successive versions.
>
> I suggest releasing 2.057 soon

We should, after fixing ALL issues raised by Mehrdad.

Andrei
December 10, 2011
On Saturday, December 10, 2011 13:23:02 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> I think we have a great release in the making: 64-bit code generation on OSX, improved floating point arithmetic, and a bunch of bugfixes.
> 
> Yet, if I had my way, I'd stop the release until every single complaint of Mehrdad's recent rampage has been looked at and addressed. Sure, we can label Mehrdad as a whiny baby, but I suspect his experience is representative for the out-of-the-box experience of many others: they see D's cool features, they download the compiler to try it out on their own terms, and as soon as they deviate from what is tried and works, or they combine features in an unusual yet meaningful manner, it all comes unglued.
> 
> It's about time to make a statement of reconnecting with our community, and in particular to the whiny babies out there. Sure, the kind of stuff we have in this beta is useful. Floating point arithmetic benchmarks have long hurt us, and 64-bit generation on OSX is a gating issue. But simple, long-standing issues that make babies whine are very important, too, and require our immediate attention.
> 
> I vote for making a strong point of fixing these out-of-the-box experience issues raised before we move forward with this release.

I confess that I don't see the point in delaying the current release for this. It's nearly ready. It seems to me that it doesn't cost us anything to just get it out the door and move on. _Then_ we focus on these issues - and possibly release 2.058 sooner than we might otherwise.

Personally, it doesn't really affect me much either way, since I always use the latest from github, but I don't quite understand what delaying a release that's about to go out the door will buy us. Focusing on const-related bugs would buy us a _lot_. The situation _has_ been improving (e.g. inout actually started working with the last release), but there's no question that issues with const still remain.

- Jonathan M Davis
December 10, 2011
On 12/10/2011 12:37 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/10/11 2:28 PM, Gour wrote:
>> On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:35:13 -0500
>> bearophile<bearophileHUGS@lycos.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> I suggest to release the nearly done 2.057 and leave those issues to
>>> 2.058 and successive versions.
>>
>> I suggest releasing 2.057 soon
>
> We should, after fixing ALL issues raised by Mehrdad.
>
> Andrei

I couldn't resist:
http://memegenerator.net/cache/instances/400x/11/11863/12148408.jpg
December 10, 2011
On 12/10/2011 12:35 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> dynamic linking should be
> available relatively soon.

2.057 makes some progress in that direction.
December 10, 2011
> >And I've also been a bit disappointed in the d way of doing things (it's easy to write good code but hard is always possible).
>

>Could you rephrase that? I don't understand.

That sentence was referring to the following paragraph. It's a great slogan but when I actually try to mess around with it it turns out that it's impossible. Note that this is absolutely not true for most cases. I've played a bit with memory editing from D, some dll injection and with the inline assembler.It worked great.

I just wish D had a bit more documentation on some more low-level parts
like raw sockets for example. Or some tutorials/howto's about the less
obvious stuff.
The howto's on d-p-l.org are,while beeing very helpful, also very sparse.

Could also someone shed some light on creating shared library's on linux? there was some news about -fPIC beeing fixed but no real confirmation.


December 10, 2011
Andrei Alexandrescu:

> We should, after fixing ALL issues raised by Mehrdad.

This is not a wise thing to do. In Bugzilla there are several issues more urgent/bigger/worse than those raised Mehrdad. In Bugzilla there is a way to tag bugs with a priority/importance.

Bye,
bearophile
December 10, 2011
On 12/10/11 9:34 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei makes a compelling case, but I am also concerned about messing
> things up for you. What is your schedule like?

First of all, I don't want it to appear like I would be demanding special treatment, which is certainly not what I intend. That being said, I originally hoped that I would be able to kick off the review process for the upstream merge before Christmas, since it looks like I am going to have barely any time to work on Thrift from the beginning of January to the mid of February due to university lab courses/exams.

Then again, I personally wouldn't be upset at all if I had to postpone the Thrift merge for another month or two – it's just that I know I'll have to prioritize university studies over my D-related projects, and thus D support in Thrift would be delayed if nobody else stepped up to do the merge (the project should be reasonably well documented, but I still doubt somebody would).

But maybe I'm grossly overestimating the implications of the issues discussed, and fixing them is just a matter of hours or a few days anyway…

Thanks for your thoughtfulness,
David
December 10, 2011
On 12/10/11 2:56 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>
>> We should, after fixing ALL issues raised by Mehrdad.
>
> This is not a wise thing to do. In Bugzilla there are several issues
> more urgent/bigger/worse than those raised Mehrdad. In Bugzilla there
> is a way to tag bugs with a priority/importance.

There is the important, there's the urgent, there's the important AND urgent, and there's also the long overdue. I want us to make a statement here, and being predictable/reasonable/rational does not make a statement.

Andrei
December 10, 2011
On 12/10/11 2:45 PM, Mehrdad wrote:
> On 12/10/2011 12:37 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 12/10/11 2:28 PM, Gour wrote:
>>> On Sat, 10 Dec 2011 14:35:13 -0500
>>> bearophile<bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I suggest to release the nearly done 2.057 and leave those issues to
>>>> 2.058 and successive versions.
>>>
>>> I suggest releasing 2.057 soon
>>
>> We should, after fixing ALL issues raised by Mehrdad.
>>
>> Andrei
>
> I couldn't resist:
> http://memegenerator.net/cache/instances/400x/11/11863/12148408.jpg

http://memegenerator.net/instance/12149588


Andrei