Hi all,

On March 22, 2014, GDC will turn 10! \o/

This is a great landmark achievement in brevity for GDC, but we still haven't achieved in my personal opinion any levity of worthy note.  So much to the point I'm beginning to give doubt myself as to how long things can continue with a bus-factor of me.

Lets talk history.

In late 2010, Digital Mars raised awareness with the FSF to start the process of merging GDC into GCC.  Nothing then happened until a year later when the copyright assignment/disclaimers had been completed by most parties.

More silenced followed for a further year until the first set of patches were ready for submission, and over the year that followed resolving implementation issues, most were spent waiting for GCC development to re-open for feature pulls.  Now a further year has gone by with that merge window open and shut and we are once again two releases away from seeing any possible inclusion.

On top of this, to this day I am yet to hear that the assignment papers have been completed by the original author, which would be a major blocker in itself.

Alarm bells should be ringing, but at times there seems to be an indifference from the core community on the matter, as if letting a valued D compiler coming up to 10 years of age go awry because of a lack of TLC is O.K.

Before this comes to sound like a death note, please be rest assured that my continued contribution shall remain, but some form of serious support really is needed to speed up process and development if we are even going to achieve any target we have set our sights on.

Lets discuss what we can positively do about the situation and start working together to a pillar goal in D's continued success.  Unless the more proactive thing to do would just be to walk in-front of that morning or afternoon bus instead of board it. :)

Regards,
Iain.

Is there anything that a supporter can do if he is unable to spend time on direct contribution? :(

On 30 January 2014 12:38, Dicebot <public@dicebot.lv> wrote:
> Is there anything that a supporter can do if he is unable to spend time on direct contribution? :(

If you have knowledge of the frontend, you can resolve implementation issues that are known to break GDC/LDC.

ie: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2200

On 30 January 2014 19:06, Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw@gdcproject.org> wrote:
> On 30 January 2014 12:38, Dicebot <public@dicebot.lv> wrote:
>> Is there anything that a supporter can do if he is unable to spend time on direct contribution? :(
>
> If you have knowledge of the frontend, you can resolve implementation issues that are known to break GDC/LDC.
>
> ie: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2200

Oh, and there's the big list of differences between GDC and DMD frontends.

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2194

On 1/30/14 4:13 AM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On March 22, 2014, GDC will turn 10! \o/
>
> This is a great landmark achievement in brevity for GDC, but we still
> haven't achieved in my personal opinion any levity of worthy note.  So
> much to the point I'm beginning to give doubt myself as to how long
> things can continue with a bus-factor of me.

Congratulations!

> Lets talk history.
>
> In late 2010, Digital Mars raised awareness with the FSF to start the
> process of merging GDC into GCC.  Nothing then happened until a year
> later when the copyright assignment/disclaimers had been completed by
> most parties.
>
> More silenced followed for a further year until the first set of patches
> were ready for submission, and over the year that followed resolving
> implementation issues, most were spent waiting for GCC development to
> re-open for feature pulls.  Now a further year has gone by with that
> merge window open and shut and we are once again two releases away from
> seeing any possible inclusion.

Sucks to be an evangelist, eh? :o) The thing is, most of the people in this forum are blissfully unaware of GNU's process, milestones, and deadlines. I know it's unpleasant to do so, but one thing to do would be to overcommunicate. There's a lot to be said about reminding people, time and again, about an impending deadline and what they can do to help. Messages in with titles like the samples below would make a world of difference:

[GDC] Four pulls up for review, aiming at GNU acceptance in three months
[GDC] Help needed: front-end pull, blocks GNU acceptance in two months
[GDC] URGENT: three weeks to GNU deadline, please review!
etc.

This kind of work is as important as the technical work you're doing (actually more important right now). It is true that more people would see others get the work done and they just download the GNU suite with GDC in it. But there's plenty of evidence there are many collaborators who are eager to help and simply don't have any information on what exactly which rocks to lift and where to take them. You need to be the guy coordinating that, and once per decade is not enough :o).

> On top of this, to this day I am yet to hear that the assignment papers
> have been completed by the original author, which would be a major
> blocker in itself.

Who's that guy and what code did he write? If no response, let's redo his work. We should not be afraid of it.

> Alarm bells should be ringing, but at times there seems to be an
> indifference from the core community on the matter, as if letting a
> valued D compiler coming up to 10 years of age go awry because of a lack
> of TLC is O.K.

(TLC = tender loving care?)

An increasing number of people depend on GDC for getting work done. Including a couple of projects here at Facebook. Yet the simple reality is that even if I summoned TODAY one of our engineers with "get on helping gdc full time", that engineer would have absolutely no idea where to start.

> Before this comes to sound like a death note, please be rest assured
> that my continued contribution shall remain, but some form of serious
> support really is needed to speed up process and development if we are
> even going to achieve any target we have set our sights on.
>
> Lets discuss what we can positively do about the situation and start
> working together to a pillar goal in D's continued success.  Unless the
> more proactive thing to do would just be to walk in-front of that
> morning or afternoon bus instead of board it. :)

Absolutely! And your note is a great breaker of the thundering silence around working together to get gdc where it belongs.

That being a large endeavor, there's one time-honored way to address it: divide it into smaller steps. So here are a few thoughts:

* Use this forum for EVERYTHING related to gdc, EXCLUSIVELY. Prefix everything with [gdc] so nobody will complain about being spammed.

* Keep people posted about ALL upcoming milestones and deadlines of the relevant gnu process.

* Find the SMALLEST indivisible step that would help push gdc toward integration, file it under bugzilla, and tag it with "gdc". Repeat this many times.

* Ask the community for help NOT on a large matter. Ask for help for EACH SMALL STEP that a competent person can get on to. I bet many in this community read your anniversary message and were like, "wow, tricky..." and back to browsing. I take it https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2200 and https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/2194 are two important ones, is that correct?

I'll do my best on my side to help with very concrete bits, i.e. put bounties on important issues or have legal contact people for signatures. But I need to know!


Andrei

On 1/30/2014 5:39 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 1/30/14 4:13 AM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>> On March 22, 2014, GDC will turn 10! \o/
> Congratulations!

Yes, well done!

> The thing is, most of the people in this
> forum are blissfully unaware of GNU's process, milestones, and deadlines. I know
> it's unpleasant to do so, but one thing to do would be to overcommunicate.
> There's a lot to be said about reminding people, time and again, about an
> impending deadline and what they can do to help.

I totally agree. The "build it and they will come" is a hollywood myth, you've got to get out in front of this and flog it.

Over the years, I've seen an awful lot of great projects created by brilliant people fall by the wayside because the creator, for whatever reason, did not flog it. This has often, sadly, left the creator frustrated and even bitter.

For example, OSCON is still open (until midnight) for speaking proposals. Submit a proposal about GDC!

http://www.oscon.com/oscon2014

See the yellow button? SUBMIT! (I did already, so has Andrei.) Don't pass up opportunities, or assume someone else will do it on your behalf.

It's not the time to be modest!

All I can say is this: GDC for me as a D developer, is invaluable. Yes I use DMD and LDC, but GCC is something I have on all machines by default. I can't wait for GDC to be inside the GCC source tree. THAT is going to be a historical moment for D community.

Keep up with the good work!

On 1/31/14, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
> * Ask the community for help NOT on a large matter.

The way I see it both the GDC and LDC projects suffer from a difficult barrier to entry for anyone new to the compilers. For example, to build either of the compilers you need to go through a massive list of things that you have to do **manually**:

http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/Installation/Generic http://wiki.dlang.org/Building_LDC_from_source

And those are Posix instructions. Windows instructions are typically out of date, randomly break, have never been tested, missing crucial info, etc etc. It's always a nightmare to build the damn thing.

Why aren't there simple scripts that can auto-build the compilers from start to finish, including fetching the dependencies? For example, someone made a script that makes building MinGW on Windows really easy:

https://github.com/niXman/mingw-builds

You can build multiple versions of MinGW, and it actually works, and its all automated.

Meanwhile to build DMD all it takes is make -f <your_platform>.mak. If DMD wasn't so easy to build *I would have never contributed to it*. But GDC and LDC have a huge barrier to entry, I honestly can't be bothered to waste yet another afternoon following someone's latest wiki entry on how to build their project, which typically fails in some step N in the instructions.

Long ago I had a shell script that cross-compiles GCC with included GDC for Windows (MinGW).

Meanwhile so many MinGW based projects appeared and I had impression that one of them has GDC bundled. Am I wrong?

Building everything should not be _that_ difficult I believe.

On Friday, 31 January 2014 at 15:17:13 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 1/31/14, Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
>> * Ask the community for help NOT on a large matter.
>
> The way I see it both the GDC and LDC projects suffer from a difficult
> barrier to entry for anyone new to the compilers. For example, to
> build either of the compilers you need to go through a massive list of
> things that you have to do **manually**:
>
> http://wiki.dlang.org/GDC/Installation/Generic
> http://wiki.dlang.org/Building_LDC_from_source
>

I am going to hazard a guess that you are not an Arch Linux fan :o)