No, I can't say who it is at this time. Sorry. But it is a huge opportunity for us.

To get the design win, we need to:

(a) get dynamic linking and loading to work

(b) improve language safety without degrading efficiency

(c) improve quality as always

Of course, these things benefit pretty much all D users anyway. Initially, (a) is the most important.

On 2/7/13, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
> To get the design win

What do you mean by "design" win? You mean we'd win another company over to D?

> (a) get dynamic linking and loading to work

Yeah we've been talking about this for ages.

Walter Bright:

> (b) improve language safety without degrading efficiency

This request is a bit too much vague. Please explain better what do you mean.

(And in what cases? Maybe just in release mode, or in all kinds of releases?)

There are many different ways to do this. Some of them need type system improvements (region analysis, removing some undefined situations, introducing a bit of flow analysis, introduce not-nullables, etc), some other of them ask for some kind of static analysis tool inside all the distributions of D compilers. Implementing a good library-defined Typedef (that the compiler is able to optimize away as much as possible) is a simple but useful improvement. In some cases safety comes from improving parts of D, like improving its Contracts, like this:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9454

Or adding the "old" (pre-state) to contracts, to make them more usable. Other ways to do it is to add a bit of analysis to be able to remove some array bound in non-release builds.

If the request of not "degrading efficiency" is meant only in release mode, then there are many more ways to do it without making the type system more complex.

General rule to keep in mind: if you accept no degraded efficiency then you need a more complex&refined type system, that usually is also more fussy and less easy to use.

Bye,
bearophile

On 2/7/2013 12:34 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> What do you mean by "design" win? You mean we'd win another company over to D?

Yes (for a project of theirs).

Andrej Mitrovic:

> What do you mean by "design" win? You mean we'd win another company over to D?

At design time you sometimes have the luxury to choose the main language you will use. I guess Walter meant that if D improves in the first of those points, D risks being the chosen language for that project.

Bye,
bearophile

On 2/7/13, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
> On 2/7/2013 12:34 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>> What do you mean by "design" win? You mean we'd win another company over to D?
>
> Yes (for a project of theirs).

Can you give us a teaser on generally what kind of work they do?

On Thursday, 7 February 2013 at 20:16:03 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> No, I can't say who it is at this time. Sorry. But it is a huge opportunity for us.

This is nice.

> To get the design win, we need to:
>
> (a) get dynamic linking and loading to work

Wasn't this realized before? By the way, last weeks there seems to be increasing dynamic linking & loading buzz like it was not an issue for ages.

> (b) improve language safety without degrading efficiency

This is vague. Language safety (meaning design improvement) or implementation (fixing bugs)? How you can measure such improvement?

> (c) improve quality as always

This is also vague. Quality of what: dmd/druntime/phobos?

> Of course, these things benefit pretty much all D users anyway. Initially, (a) is the most important.

I guess recent patches dedicated to the issue came at right time.

On 2/7/2013 12:47 PM, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> Can you give us a teaser on generally what kind of work they do?


Much as I'd like to say more, I can't.

On 2/7/2013 1:01 PM, Maxim Fomin wrote:
> I guess recent patches dedicated to the issue came at right time.

The timing is indeed fortuitous.

As for your comments about vagueness, yes, it is vague. The DLL support is clear, though, it either works or it doesn't. The other issues are a work in progress, and they understand that. We just have to make progress.

Can't wait to finally see (a) in all its glory :)