On Saturday, 4 November 2017 at 02:33:35 UTC, Computermatronic wrote:
> Can we please get back on topic please?

Umm... we haven't been 'on topic' since about 210 threads ago ;-)

When...Adam decided to claim that "..the few that don't will have little trouble understanding why they need it [VS+WinSDK] and acquiring it."

And a little after that one, claiming "the attitudes around here towards Windows devs can be more than a little snobbish.".

And then a little after that one, implying that installing VS is less a hassle for new user to D, than in installing Xocde, because at least with VS2017 you can pick and choose.

Not that I blame Adam for anything ;-)

except...that comments were not as well accepted as he might have thought they would have been ;-)

If all this cognitive effort were instead going into writing some code, imagine what could have been achieved by now ;-)

On Saturday, 4 November 2017 at 02:33:35 UTC, Computermatronic wrote:
> On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 18:26:54 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 18:08:54 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
>>> On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 17:25:26 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Most programmers will one day be coding on mobile devices, though I admit I'm in a small, early-adopting minority now:
>>>>
>>>> http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/six-weeks-working-android/
>>>>
>>>
>>> A blog post is not evidence that the majority of programmers will be coding on mobile devices.
>>
>> Yes, but it is evidence of what I said, that "I'm in a small, early-adopting minority now."  I don't know how you expect evidence for something that _will_ happen, it's a prediction I'm making, though based on current, rising trends like all those in this feed:
>>
>> https://mobile.twitter.com/termux
>
> Can we please get back on topic please?

Yes, it is as simple as changing the topic up top back to the original, like I have now and you didn't, and discussing something else.  You don't have to read messages that were marked as OT, like mine were, nobody's making you.

> Whether or not windows is 'dying' is irrelevant, since it is not going to die out as a development platform for at least the next 5 years.
>
> I, like many other windows users, want to be able to compile 64bit binaries in windows, without having to download and install the bloated and time consuming to download and install Visual Studio.
>
> I do most of my programming in Sublime Text, and frequently re-install windows. This may not be the case for many windows users of D, but clearly many windows users of D would like to be able to compile x64 out of the box.

I was intrigued by someone saying in this thread that Go supports Win64 COFF out of the box, so I just tried it out in wine and indeed it works with their hello world example.  Running "go build -x" shows that they ship a link.exe for Win64 with their Win64 zip, guess it's the Mingw one?

If you want something similar for the D compiler packages for Win64, I suggest you file a bugzilla issue, as that's where the core team and other D devs look for stuff to do:

https://issues.dlang.org

The more info you have about the linker Go is using, the better.  Best if you just submit a pull request for dmd or its installer, making it use this other linker so that VS is not needed:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pulls
https://github.com/dlang/installer/pulls

D is a community effort, pitch in to make the things you want happen.

On Saturday, 4 November 2017 at 08:16:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I was intrigued by someone saying in this thread that Go supports Win64 COFF out of the box, so I just tried it out in wine and indeed it works with their hello world example.  Running "go build -x" shows that they ship a link.exe for Win64 with their Win64 zip, guess it's the Mingw one?

Does Go need WinSDK though?

On Sunday, 5 November 2017 at 14:19:11 UTC, MrSmith wrote:
> On Saturday, 4 November 2017 at 08:16:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I was intrigued by someone saying in this thread that Go supports Win64 COFF out of the box, so I just tried it out in wine and indeed it works with their hello world example.  Running "go build -x" shows that they ship a link.exe for Win64 with their Win64 zip, guess it's the Mingw one?
>
> Does Go need WinSDK though?

Not for the hello world sample I tried in wine, maybe you need to get some libraries for other stuff, dunno.

On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 14:12:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:


> I don't know why you're so obsessed with storage when even midrange smartphones come with 32 GBs nowadays, expandable to much more with an SD card.  My tablet has only 16 GBs of storage, with only 10-12 actually accessible, but I've never had a problem building codebases that take up GBs of space with all the object files, alongside a 64 GB microSD card for many, mostly HD TV shows and movies.

The smallest storage Windows 10/Linux laptops have is a 128GB SSD. Even with a faster 128GB SSD being around the price of a 1TB hard drive, I still see 1TB being the dominant low-end storage. So I am going by what I see being offered as a minimum. It may be that most or even 99% of people can get by with 32GB flash memory, but it isn't being offered (except on Chromebooks which have traditionally only been web browsers, and on Windows 10S machines which can only run Windows Store apps).


>>
>> Are you suggesting they are developing their games for iOS and Android devices ON those devices? Apple has XCode for developing iOS apps and it runs on macOS machines only. There is also the Xamarin IDE or IDE plug-in from Microsoft that allows C# on iOS, but it runs on macOS or WIndows. For Android, there is Android Studio - "The Official IDE of Android" - which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no Android version.
>
> Yes, of course they're still largely developing mobile games on PCs, though I'm not sure why you think that matters.  But your original claim was that they're still using PC-focused IDEs, as opposed to new mobile-focused IDEs like XCode or Android Studio, which you now highlight.

I never made any previous claim about what IDEs are being used. The only time I previously mentioned an IDE was with regard to RemObjects and Embarcadero offering cross-compilation to Android/iOS with their products.

"There is a case to be made for supporting  Android/iOS cross-compilation. But it doesn't have to come at the expense of Windows 64-bit integration. Not sure they even involve the same skillsets. Embarcadero and Remobjects both now support Android/iOS development from their Windows (and macOS in the case of Remobjects) IDEs."

That was to highlight that those two compiler companies have seen fit to also cross-compile to mobile - they saw an importance to mobile development. It wasn't about what IDEs are best for mobile or even what IDEs are being used for mobile.

Not that it matters, but I don't think that XCode meets the definition of "new mobile-focused IDE" as-as far as I know, it was developed for OS X development and is still used for such. Android Studio may be "new mobile-focused", even though based on IntelliJ IDEA.

> Yes, Windows is dominant, dominant in a niche, internal IT.  The consumer mobile market is much larger nowadays, and Windows has almost no market share there.

Sad too, because of all the tablet/phone interfaces, the only one that is not just "icons on a background", and my personal preference, is Windows Mobile.

>
> As for Microsoft, Windows is not their only product, they have moved Office onto the dominant mobile platforms.  As long as they keep supporting mobile, they could eke out an existence.  Their big bet on Azure is going to end badly though.

They have Word, Excel, Powerpoint for mobile, but they are free. The Android store mentions "in-app purchases" but I wasn't offered any. Maybe it is for OneDrive storage of files. I already have that so it could be why I don't see anything to purchase in the app.


>> Why did they fund development of a new iMac Pro which is coming this December as well as the new MacBook Pros that came out this June? That's a contradiction of "milk it like an iPod".
>
> Because their userbase was rebelling?  I take it you're not that familiar with Mac users, but they were genuinely scared that Apple was leaving them behind, since they weren't refreshing Mac and Macbooks much anymore and all Apple's focus is on iOS:

So, let them rebel. You said that they would like to see it go away, and/or they want to milk it. If you have to spend money on development to keep selling it, then you can't "milk it".


It is ironic that Microsoft and Ubuntu both saw a convergence of mobile and desktop and began modifying their desktop interace to best suit mobile, and now  Ubuntu has abandoned the idea and Microsoft has abandoned the phone market. As it turns out, any convergence will have to come from the two dominant mobile OSes as it is impossible to go the other direction due to the app catch-22.

On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 06:37:52 UTC, Tony wrote:
> On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 14:12:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I don't know why you're so obsessed with storage when even midrange smartphones come with 32 GBs nowadays, expandable to much more with an SD card.  My tablet has only 16 GBs of storage, with only 10-12 actually accessible, but I've never had a problem building codebases that take up GBs of space with all the object files, alongside a 64 GB microSD card for many, mostly HD TV shows and movies.
>
> The smallest storage Windows 10/Linux laptops have is a 128GB SSD. Even with a faster 128GB SSD being around the price of a 1TB hard drive, I still see 1TB being the dominant low-end storage. So I am going by what I see being offered as a minimum. It may be that most or even 99% of people can get by with 32GB flash memory, but it isn't being offered (except on Chromebooks which have traditionally only been web browsers, and on Windows 10S machines which can only run Windows Store apps).

The vast majority of users would be covered by 5-10 GBs of available storage, which is why the lowest tier of even the luxury iPhone was 16 GBs until last year.  Every time I talk to normal people, ie non-techies unlike us, and ask them how much storage they have in their device, whether smartphone, tablet, or laptop, they have no idea.  If I look in the device, I inevitably find they're only using something like 3-5 GBs max, out of the 20-100+ GBs they have available.

You only need 32 GBs or more if you're downloading a bunch of HD videos like I do, playing giant AAA games, or setting up a bunch of VMs, like some devs do.  These are all niche uses, that 99% of users don't partake in, which is why 32 GBs is plenty for them.

>>> Are you suggesting they are developing their games for iOS and Android devices ON those devices? Apple has XCode for developing iOS apps and it runs on macOS machines only. There is also the Xamarin IDE or IDE plug-in from Microsoft that allows C# on iOS, but it runs on macOS or WIndows. For Android, there is Android Studio - "The Official IDE of Android" - which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. There is no Android version.
>>
>> Yes, of course they're still largely developing mobile games on PCs, though I'm not sure why you think that matters.  But your original claim was that they're still using PC-focused IDEs, as opposed to new mobile-focused IDEs like XCode or Android Studio, which you now highlight.
>
> I never made any previous claim about what IDEs are being used. The only time I previously mentioned an IDE was with regard to RemObjects and Embarcadero offering cross-compilation to Android/iOS with their products.
>
> "There is a case to be made for supporting  Android/iOS cross-compilation. But it doesn't have to come at the expense of Windows 64-bit integration. Not sure they even involve the same skillsets. Embarcadero and Remobjects both now support Android/iOS development from their Windows (and macOS in the case of Remobjects) IDEs."
>
> That was to highlight that those two compiler companies have seen fit to also cross-compile to mobile - they saw an importance to mobile development. It wasn't about what IDEs are best for mobile or even what IDEs are being used for mobile.

If you look back to the first mention of IDES, it was your statement, "Good luck selling game developers on using D to develop for Android, when you can't supply those same game developers a top-notch development environment for the premier platform for performance critical games - Windows 64-bit."

That at least implies that they're using the same IDE to target both mobile and PC gaming, which is what I was disputing.  If you agree that they use completely different toolchains, then it is irrelevant whether D supports Windows-focused IDEs, as it doesn't affect mobile-focused devs.

> Not that it matters, but I don't think that XCode meets the definition of "new mobile-focused IDE" as-as far as I know, it was developed for OS X development and is still used for such. Android Studio may be "new mobile-focused", even though based on IntelliJ IDEA.

Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards mobile development.  XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's pretty much all that devs are using it for these days.

>> Yes, Windows is dominant, dominant in a niche, internal IT.  The consumer mobile market is much larger nowadays, and Windows has almost no market share there.
>
> Sad too, because of all the tablet/phone interfaces, the only one that is not just "icons on a background", and my personal preference, is Windows Mobile.

I've always thought that flat Metro interface was best suited for mobile displays, the easiest to view, render, and touch.  To some extent, all the other mobile interfaces have copied it, with their move to flat UIs over the years.  However, it obviously takes much more than a nice GUI to do well in mobile.

>> As for Microsoft, Windows is not their only product, they have moved Office onto the dominant mobile platforms.  As long as they keep supporting mobile, they could eke out an existence.  Their big bet on Azure is going to end badly though.
>
> They have Word, Excel, Powerpoint for mobile, but they are free. The Android store mentions "in-app purchases" but I wasn't offered any. Maybe it is for OneDrive storage of files. I already have that so it could be why I don't see anything to purchase in the app.

My understanding is that they're not full Office either, that features are still missing that you can only get in the paid desktop version.  I don't know how much those missing features matter, as I don't use Office or any such suite, but MS would be making a mistake to not offer those on mobile eventually.

>>> Why did they fund development of a new iMac Pro which is coming this December as well as the new MacBook Pros that came out this June? That's a contradiction of "milk it like an iPod".
>>
>> Because their userbase was rebelling?  I take it you're not that familiar with Mac users, but they were genuinely scared that Apple was leaving them behind, since they weren't refreshing Mac and Macbooks much anymore and all Apple's focus is on iOS:
>
> So, let them rebel. You said that they would like to see it go away, and/or they want to milk it. If you have to spend money on development to keep selling it, then you can't "milk it".

You and I and Jobs may've let them rebel, but Apple is a public corporation.  They can't just let easy money go, their shareholders may not like it. Perhaps you're not too familiar with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making good money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good Apple devs off the real cash cow, iPhone.  Even if the Mac financials aren't _that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily want to piss off your oldest and most loyal customers, who may stop buying iPhones and iPads too.

So they have to constantly make a calculation, has the Mac userbase shrunk enough yet that they can just ditch that legacy desktop OS?  Maybe they have a converged device in the works, ie the iPhone XV will ship a macOS GUI/environment as an iOS software upgrade to be used with their version of Dex/Sentio, after which they can tell those users, "Just buy an iPhone and get the Mac software upgrade." ;)

Either way, I'm sure they're crunching the numbers every quarter on when to cut bait, but given they've kept the iPod Touch around this long, I doubt the Mac will be axed anytime soon.  They've already heavily cut their Mac investment though, as all you hear from Mac users is that the pace of feature development and bug fixes has greatly slowed (this article also dings iOS, but notice that most of the specific criticism is for OS X and its apps):

https://pljns.com/blog/2016/02/04/apples-declining-software-quality/

> It is ironic that Microsoft and Ubuntu both saw a convergence of mobile and desktop and began modifying their desktop interace to best suit mobile, and now  Ubuntu has abandoned the idea and Microsoft has abandoned the phone market. As it turns out, any convergence will have to come from the two dominant mobile OSes as it is impossible to go the other direction due to the app catch-22.

I think Jobs got it right that you cannot converge too early, ie Apple kept their desktop and mobile OS's separate and are only slowly converging them.  One reason is that the mobile hardware was just not powerful and efficient enough back when Windows 8 tried to converge the two UIs.  Another is that the mobile market is much more important and far larger, so its better to focus more on getting that right, then just add a desktop GUI later as a mobile feature.

Microsoft was really caught between a rock and a hard place, as that desktop GUI for "lean forward" work is all they knew, what the entire computing market and their dominant business was built on.  For MS to rush headlong into mobile-first and leave the desktop behind would've taken a giant push, one that their corporate culture, fat, flush, and arrogant after a decade of minting money, was likely incapable of making.

Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic, so fast, not even Jobs by all indications.  Mobile has really been a tidal wave over the last decade.  Funny how all you hear is bitching and whining from a bunch of devs on proggit/HN about how they missed the '80s PC boom or '90s dot.com boom and there's nothing fundamentally exciting like that now, all while the biggest boom of them all, the mobile boom, just grew and grew right in front of their faces. :D

On Saturday, 4 November 2017 at 02:33:35 UTC, Computermatronic wrote:
> I, like many other windows users, want to be able to compile 64bit binaries in windows, without having to download and install the bloated and time consuming to download and install Visual Studio.
>
> I do most of my programming in Sublime Text, and frequently re-install windows. This may not be the case for many windows users of D, but clearly many windows users of D would like to be able to compile x64 out of the box.

So your fine with reinstalling Windows, going through the entire processing to setup and configure. Download all the new updates and install them. Then setup your environment, downloading potentially dozens of applications (git, debuggers, text editors, compilers, etc..) and configuring settings? But downloading Visual Studio is "time consuming".. I don't even. If all you can complain about Visual Studio is its download size then I'd say it's doing pretty good as a development tool.

On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards mobile development.  XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's pretty much all that devs are using it for these days.

iOS has always been mostly a subset of OS-X. There are some differences in the UI components, but the general architecture is the same.

I'm not sure why you claim that people aren't writing for OS-X. Just because the iOS space is flooded with simple software does not mean that people don't write complicated applications for OS-X.

E.g. there are lots of simple audio applications for iOS, but the complicated ones are on OS-X.

> with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making good money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good Apple devs off the real cash cow, iPhone.  Even if the Mac financials aren't _that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily want to piss off your oldest and most loyal customers, who may stop buying iPhones and iPads too.

I don't know if I trust the current management in Apple, they seem to be too hung up on fashion and squeezing the market, but fashions change and fashion items are relatively quickly commoditised. It is slightly slower in this space because the upfront investments are high, but it is easier than in the CPU market where you have some objective measures for performance.

This dynamic used to be the case with cell phones too, but eventually Nokia lost that market. Similarly, this dynamic used to be the case with Apple's MacIntosh line. They approached it as a fashion item and they almost folded over it.

One reason that Apple could price up their iOS products was that people could justify buying a more expensive phone/tablet since they also replaced their digital camera with it, then the video camera.

You have to view their push of iPad Pro in the same vein, it is a product that cannot be commoditised yet and they try to defend the price by convincing people to think of it as a laptop.

It would be a bad idea for Apple to ditch the Mac. It is a product that is much more difficult to commoditise than the iOS products. And their owners tend to have multiple Apple devices, so it does not take away from the iOS sales, it comes in addition.

The performance of mobile devices will always be limited by heat. The reason mobile devices perform well is that a lot of effort has been put into making good use of the GPU.

The reason that desktops are not improving much is probably because AMD has not been able to keep up with Intel, but Intel is now on the market with i9, so maybe they are feeling threatened by Ryzen.

> Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic,

If you are talking about devices, then this is completely false. "mobile" was big before iOS. The academic circles was flooded by "mobile this - mobile that" around year 2000, by 2005 the big thing was AR which only now is gradually becoming available. (And VR peaked around 1995, and is slowly becoming available now).

What was unexpected is that Apple and Samsung managed to hold onto such a large segment for so many years. I think Android's initial application inefficiency (Java) has a lot to do with it. Apple chose to limit the hardware to a very narrow architecture and got more performance from that hardware by going binary. That was a gamble too, but they were big enough to take control over it by building their own CPUs.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 07:57:11 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards mobile development.  XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's pretty much all that devs are using it for these days.
>
> iOS has always been mostly a subset of OS-X. There are some differences in the UI components, but the general architecture is the same.

One is a touch-first mobile OS that heavily restricts what you can do in the background and didn't even have a file manager until this year, while the other is a classic desktop OS, so there are significant differences.

> I'm not sure why you claim that people aren't writing for OS-X. Just because the iOS space is flooded with simple software does not mean that people don't write complicated applications for OS-X.
>
> E.g. there are lots of simple audio applications for iOS, but the complicated ones are on OS-X.

I never said they don't write apps for macOS, I said iOS is a much bigger market which many more write for.

>> with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making good money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good Apple devs off the real cash cow, iPhone.  Even if the Mac financials aren't _that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily want to piss off your oldest and most loyal customers, who may stop buying iPhones and iPads too.
>
> I don't know if I trust the current management in Apple, they seem to be too hung up on fashion and squeezing the market, but fashions change and fashion items are relatively quickly commoditised. It is slightly slower in this space because the upfront investments are high, but it is easier than in the CPU market where you have some objective measures for performance.

They have been selling the most popular expensive "fashion item" in the world for a decade now.  And according to objective benchmarks, their hardware blows away everybody else in mobile, so they have that going for them too.

> This dynamic used to be the case with cell phones too, but eventually Nokia lost that market. Similarly, this dynamic used to be the case with Apple's MacIntosh line. They approached it as a fashion item and they almost folded over it.

The same may happen to the iPhone some day, but it shows no signs of letting up.

> One reason that Apple could price up their iOS products was that people could justify buying a more expensive phone/tablet since they also replaced their digital camera with it, then the video camera.
>
> You have to view their push of iPad Pro in the same vein, it is a product that cannot be commoditised yet and they try to defend the price by convincing people to think of it as a laptop.

Since they still have a ways to go to make the cameras or laptop-functionality as good as the standalone products they replaced, it would appear they can still convince their herd to stay on the upgrade cycle.

> It would be a bad idea for Apple to ditch the Mac. It is a product that is much more difficult to commoditise than the iOS products. And their owners tend to have multiple Apple devices, so it does not take away from the iOS sales, it comes in addition.

While I disagree that you can't commoditize the Mac, as you could just bundle most of the needed functionality into an iPhone, I already said that Mac users probably buy iPhones and that Apple's unlikely to kill off the Mac anytime soon, though they've already significantly cut the team working on it.

> The performance of mobile devices will always be limited by heat. The reason mobile devices perform well is that a lot of effort has been put into making good use of the GPU.

Even within that lower power budget, performance is now so good that it rivals laptop CPUs, which is what goes into most PCs sold nowadays, so heat and the GPU are not that much of a concern anymore.

> The reason that desktops are not improving much is probably because AMD has not been able to keep up with Intel, but Intel is now on the market with i9, so maybe they are feeling threatened by Ryzen.

No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the performance.

>> Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic,
>
> If you are talking about devices, then this is completely false. "mobile" was big before iOS. The academic circles was flooded by "mobile this - mobile that" around year 2000, by 2005 the big thing was AR which only now is gradually becoming available. (And VR peaked around 1995, and is slowly becoming available now).

You are conflating two different things, fashionable academic topics and industry projections for actual production, which is what I was talking about.  I agree that a lot of people were talking about mobile being potentially next for awhile, Microsoft even came out with their UMPC platform years before the iPhone:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC

But if you looked at the chart I linked earlier, where mobile sales jumped 25X in a decade, that is extremely difficult to predict, as it was driven by a host of mobile CPU, display, 3G/4G, and power improvements that nobody saw happening so fast.

Fashionable tech topics are mostly irrelevant, I'm talking about actual sales projections, especially when you're so confident in them that you bet your company on them.  Nobody other than Apple did that, which is why they're still reaping the rewards today.

> What was unexpected is that Apple and Samsung managed to hold onto such a large segment for so many years. I think Android's initial application inefficiency (Java) has a lot to do with it. Apple chose to limit the hardware to a very narrow architecture and got more performance from that hardware by going binary. That was a gamble too, but they were big enough to take control over it by building their own CPUs.

Those two companies still have the best hardware and the multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets to make sure you know it, ;) no doubt that helps them maintain their share.

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 08:53:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the performance.
>

I don't agree. Consumers would welcome more performance - and many of us 'need' it too.

But cpu's have hit the heat barrier, and so manufacturers tend to focus on more cores, better caching algorithms, and such...

but I am sure that consumers would find a 10GHz quad core processor far more useful than a 4Ghz 24 core one.

Then you have the challenges of redesigning programming languages and software development methodologies to take better advantage of the multi-core thing...

There is also the problem of no real competition against Intel, so real innovation is not occuring as rapidly as it once did.

What we really need, is to get rid of that heat barrier - which means lots and lots  of money (potentially billions) into new research... and without competition, why should Intel bother? They can just do a few minor tweaks here and there, increment a number, and call the tweaked i7 ..the i9.