Le 10/02/2014 09:59, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" a écrit :
> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 04:26:10 UTC, Manu wrote:
>>> The only company I know of that has made a commercial commitment to D
>>> is a
>>> AAA games company...
>
> Unfortunately a AAA games company is not setting down the goal post for
> D. As long as the leads for the project have as their primary interests:
> non-real-time stuff and STL-like-libraries things won't develop in your
> (and mine and Fransescos) direction.
>
> It won't happen until the leads of the project COMMIT to a MEASURABLE
> goal and a major effort is made to meet that goal. That means putting
> other goals aside until that measurable goal has been met.
>
>> Sorry, I obviously mean, "the only *games* company..."
>
> Yeah, but that games company needs to commit to taking a lead role so
> that the goal post and vision changes in that direction.
>
>> And people seem to forget promptly after every single time I repeat
>> myself:
>>  * The GC frequency of execution is directly proportional to the
>> amount of
>> _free memory_. In console games; NONE.
>>  * The length of the associated pause is directly proportional to the
>> amount of memory currently in use. In console games; all of it.
>>
>> This doesn't only describe games, it describes any embedded environment.
>
> I've already stated that I don't believe in using D for anything
> multi-media.
>

????
So in these case I will forget D, and cry all the tears of my body. It will just a shame for a system language.
And it's certainly kind of applications actually miss for D, to improve his visibility.

Just take a look around you all applications are interactive, with more animations,...


> It is not part of the project vision to be good at that from what I am
> seeing, and I am not going to believe it is going to be good for that
> until the project leads commit to measurable goals.
>
> The leads believe in meritocracy, that means the project will flail
> around in any direction that is fun. That means there are no rails.
> There is no reason to pull or push a train that is not on rails. To get
> D to be a true better C++ you need a concerted effort.
>

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:06:06 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> You do that :D
>
> I'll be waiting. Some people just need to run into the roadblock to notice it exists.

Which roadblock?

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 21:57:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> A bit off topic, but can you still get new single core chips?

Sure you can. But that is far from common, unless you have really strict constraints.

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:07:06 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:06:06 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> You do that :D
>>
>> I'll be waiting. Some people just need to run into the roadblock to notice it exists.
>
> Which roadblock?

deadalanix has been working on SDC for quite a while - alternative implementation of D frontend using LLVM for code gen.

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:06:56 UTC, Xavier Bigand wrote:
> ????
> So in these case I will forget D, and cry all the tears of my body. It will just a shame for a system language.
> And it's certainly kind of applications actually miss for D, to improve his visibility.

Yes, but nobody that are in the "decision making body" of D has shown any resemblance of understanding or priority for real time applications. Seriously, the language is close to ten years in the making.

> Just take a look around you all applications are interactive, with more animations,...

Yeah, but at some point you just have to accept that people who don't have a need to write real time will avoid putting it on the road map.

I would like to see a roadmap that says "real time" and "no gc" and "whole program optimization", "owned pointers", "shared pointers"++

I see no road map.

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:07:06 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:06:06 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> You do that :D
>>
>> I'll be waiting. Some people just need to run into the roadblock to notice it exists.
>
> Which roadblock?

You seems to knows everything in and out. You tell me. If you
aren't sure, please start parsing D to clang AST. After all, that
sound like a great idea.

I'm not sure I want to spend any time trying to convince you considering:
 1 - people have been trying and it looks like a time consuming energy hungry task.
 2 - You don't seems interested to actually contribute anything.

So start you clang idea, if it sounds great to you. And come back enlightened.

On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 23:12:08 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> deadalanix has been working on SDC for quite a while - alternative implementation of D frontend using LLVM for code gen.

Ah ok, I didn't suggest implementing D, but a subset that maps directly to C++.

Then you can map directly to the AST.

On 2/10/14, 12:48 AM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 04:22:32 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Your thoughts are appreciated (all 6 of them in as many sentences).
>> There is something to be said, however, about armchair quarterbacking
>> and holier-than-thou kibitzing on what others should be doing. This
>> community is as close as it gets to a meritocracy, so if you think you
>> know what's good, you do good. If you want your stupendously many "I
>> think"s to carry weight, follow them with some "I do"s as well. Hop on
>> github. This endless walk through your knowledge base just isn't useful.
>
> Good job, my initial response to Manu was a critique of going Ad Hominem
> and you as a person time and time again fail in that regard in many
> discussions.

Totally. For the most part I take posts one at a time and at face value only, it's just that sometimes larger patterns develop themselves. But as I told Walter, for better or (sometimes definitely) worse, our character flaws make history inside the D community.

> You do however deserve a round of ad hominem because you as
> one of the two people who are in a position to communicate the project
> vision and set forth MEASURABLE goals that can be tracked and evaluated,
> but you refuse to do so.

A fresh perspective is always good to take under consideration. It's also a good opportunity to bring more transparency to what we're doing, as I'll do below.

> All talk of meritocracy is essentially hypocrisy because all projects
> need to establish boundaries and a goal post, and you fail miserably in
> that regard. That's why D is a slow mover. "This endless walk through
> [my] knowledgebase" is of course not a walk through my knowledgebase, it
> is an assessment of the project that YOU FAIL to attempt to do. It is my
> attempt to try to figure out where this project is heading.
>
> You are right, I should not have to do it. YOU SHOULD DO IT. AND PRESENT
> IT. That way people won't be let down.

I have done so. Several times. Two very simple examples from recent history:

1. I stressed that good work on bugs with bounties is a gesture of good will with Facebook that will bring more support from the company. It's the trifecta: the bugs are not harder than those people work on anyway, it's good impact on the future of the language, and it's even non-negligible money. E.g. I wrote on 2014-01-11:

> My hope is to convince that the message Facebook is conveying here is
> much stronger than the actual sums involved; it's an initiation of
> cooperation and involvement with a community, and it would be awesome
> to respond in kind.

Taking a look at https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/383571-d-programming-language, however, reveals that there's little attention to those bugs, in SPITE of the fact that contributions on HARDER problems on the SAME project continued as furiously as ever, if not more.

2. I said many times our inability to review github contributions at the rate they arrive is an important problem we're facing. We currently have 216 open pull requests across our projects. I think this bottleneck very concretely limits the growth speed of D.

This is a typical problem. Reviewing contributions is hard and thankless work. I know how we solved it at Facebook for our many open-sourced projects: we created a team for it, with a manager, tracking progress, the works. This is _exactly_ the kind of thing that can't be done in a volunteer community.

The reality is that on a volunteer-driven project, it's not easy to tell people what to do. They're by definition in it for working what _they_ want to work on. Applying classic management techniques naively is unlikely to work because all management techniques are using resources toward goals and assume the appropriately qualified human resources will work on what the project requires be done.

So I wasn't glib when I sent you to github. In a very concrete sense, you'd be helping there a ton more in a fraction of the time you spend posting.

> I like the initial vision Walter Bright put forth years ago, that is to
> make a better C++. That has somehow evolved into making a compiled C#.
> Can you please ASSESS that.

I think D must not define itself in relation to any other language.

> You and Walter Bright are leads.
>
> I expect any project and you to put forth:
>
> 1. A clear vision that establish a firm boundary.
> 2. A small set of clear measurable goals that give the project direction.
> 3. A list of points stating what the project is not going to address in
> the immediate future.

Some of these are useful to put together at least as (a) thoughts on what I believe would be high-impact topics, (b) things that I plan personally to work on.

> This endless walk through what is wrong with D project management just
> isn't useful, because you don't want to listen.

Honestly, as one who's been at this for a long time and has done and witnessed a number of such attempts, I think you're exceedingly naive about what can be done with traditional project management approaches in this case.

Three simple anecdotes out of many:

1. I've had a long chat with a Linux senior kernel guy who's been there since the very early days. Back then Linux did not have any form of project management, and nobody told people what to work on. People just worked on whatever itch they wanted to scratch. The way it succeeded is getting the attention of sufficiently many people that there was someone on each possible itch :o). Still, for a very long time (years after actual heavy corporate support emerged) many Linux tools looked like proofs of concept compared to the mature Windows equivalents.

2. A few months ago a prominent member of the community made (privately to Walter and myself) a strong argument along the same lines as yours: D could move much faster if some good management could be used with it, and offered to ask as a manager of the project. I explained him with (other) examples what I'm explaining you now, of which the most important point was that resource management can be done if there are resources to manage. He understood my point (and was gracious enough to continue work within the community). I don't think things have changed in that regard since he made is bid.

3. Only a few _days_ ago Walter and I were discussing with another prominent community member. He is the author of a project that beautifully plays into D's strengths to the end of really being the best in the world at a very measurable metric. Walter and I emphasized how finalizing and streamlining this project would both launch his career on a meteoric orbit, and have a strong impact on D. He, however, is busy with schoolwork and some other D projects that are comparatively just irrelevant - and that's where the discussion just kind of ended. Had he been a report of mine, I would have simple ensured that I assign all his other tasks to someone else, and discuss goals and milestones with him for the high-impact project. But he's not, so I can't. This alone would have been enough to disabuse me of any illusions I could do project management on Dlang.

Ola, I'm sure you mean well. I trust you will find it within yourself the best way to contribute to this community.


Andrei

Le 10/02/2014 13:04, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" a écrit :
> On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 09:36:53 UTC, Manu wrote:
>> I'm confused. A couple of posts ago, you seemed to be annoyed at me for
>> consistently raising games as a target application space that was
>> unrealistic, or not 'down to earth', or some fairly niche and irrelevant
>> target workload.
>
> Sorry about that. I have been following D since 2005, on and off, and
> kept waiting for the "better C++" to materialize so I can use it to do
> fun stuff with it (audio, 3D, raytracing etc).
>
> One hobby of mine is to read Intel/AMD CPU docs, raytracing papers and
> compiler stuff, and discussing those aspects and improving my
> understanding of those areas is fun. I am loosing hope in that direction
> for D, because I don't think D has anyone with a strong interest in
> project management that can drive it in that direction. The responses
> from the D leads shows signs, not of a lack of skills, but a lack of
> interest in project management "theory" (and unfortunately, that is an
> area where I know the theory quite well since I majored in that area).
>
> On the fun side I want what you want. I would love to see you be the
> third lead on D, to get a person that "falls to sleep thinking real
> time" into that position would make me believe in the project.
>
> On the "pay for bread" side I am looking at D from the perspective of
> having an alternative to Go on the server side. I guess that has made me
> "janus-faced" in this discussion. What would make me tilt in favour of
> Go instead of D, is that it has corporate backing and therefore give
> priority to production level stability. Even though I like the semantics
> of D better. Stability is important to me since I personally pay the
> price (literally) for technical flaws since I offer fixed priced solutions.
>
> Instead of A.A. and W.B. going defensive (and yes it is painful to see
> your child get a needle in the foot at the doctor to get that vaccine
> that will keep the child healthy in the long term) they should try to
> get someone into the team of leads that has an interest in software
> development process and software process improvement. Or at the very
> least, one person with real time focus.
>
> (Please note that I found it quite amusing that you claimed that I was
> ignorant of long running games, since I studied Anarchy Online from
> inception to end in a qualitative manner while trying to figure out the
> design properties of the design domain, from a system development
> perspective. You don't have to convince me, I do understand where you
> are coming from and enjoy reading about your perspective. ;^)
>
>> Video games is a bigger industry than the movie industry. Casual/phones
>> have captured a large slice in recent years, but the rest of the pie is
>> almost entirely games consoles, which I don't think is a diminishing
>> industry so much as the casual/phone space is rather growing the pie in
>> overall volume. The industry is expanding as a whole.
>
> Yes, unfortunately the revenue in the mobile app space is very low for
> the majority of developers which requires tools that make them very
> productive at the cost of technical quality. So lots of stuff is being
> done with cheap (and not really performant) tech to cut down on dev time.

Yes I can't tell you how hard it is. Plus editors that are much more concern historically by market than product quality, cause "mobile apps" are seen as cheap software. So few people take it seriously, maybe only Apple understand friendly applications have to be perfectly polished to be a commercial success.

> A more performant and productive language could certainly make a
> difference, but to get there you need to focus on that niche, otherwise
> it will take too many years to catch up with the alternatives (with
> their eco system). And the landscape keeps changing very quickly.
> Companies that offer 3rd party solutions fold all the time. So mobile
> devs are "jaded".
>
>> I don't think anyone in the D community really has that power. If Walter
>> were to dictate direction that was unpopular enough, the developer base
>> would promptly dissolve.
>
> Yes, some would leave, but others would join. Those who today look at D
> and say:
>
> - "This is kind of cool, but not quite there yet"
>
> - "when can I expect to see it land in the area where it makes me
> productive"
>
> - "is this cart worth pushing, can we actually make a significant
> improvement here or do I have to push this cart all by myself"
>
> I would imagine that there are more people sitting on the fence than not.
>
> What made Linux work out was that they were aiming for a well defined
> vision, Unix. Progress was easy to measure.
>
> What made Linux fail on the desktop that they did not have a well
> defined vision, so the community spread out on N alternatives and
> progress was hard to measure.
>
> This is a bit simplistic, but Open Source projects that does not have a
> strongly projected vision tends to wither and dissolve over time.
>
>> the goal. Contributing to D is, in some way, a form of recreation for
>> contributors.
>
> But you still need a clear vision and well defined goals, because for
> every "fun" bit there is 2 "unfun" bits. For every "excellent feature",
> you have to axe "2 nice to haves". (kind of)
>
>> Are you saying I don't complain enough? :) (at least, last year before
>> I left)
>> I would never want to assert authority on the language direction on
>> behalf
>> of a single company, like you say, it's a niche target, although a
>> very big
>> niche which I think will really benefit from D.
>
> Actually, I think you have the passion to put forth a vision that could
> bring D to real time and thus make it a project that is making "fun"
> possible.
>
> With no "real time" person on the team I probably will take the "hobby
> focus" and enjoy discussing technological possibilites (such as the
> discussion we had about ref counting recently).
>
> If that makes A.A. upset. Great. He should be. I am implying that D
> needs leadership. He should take leadership. If he does not want to
> listen. Well, in that case I am not forcing him to read what I write.
> But pointing to github is pointing in the wrong direction. Github tracks
> missing bolts and nuts, not a skewed skeleton.
>
>> I just make sure that people never forget that the niche exists, what the
>> requirements are, and that tends to result in those targets being
>> factored
>> into conversations and designs.
>
> I am perfectly cool with that. If AAA games is the vision. Good. My
> prime gripe is the lack of a clearly stated vision. I could go with any
> "system level" vision that is not covered by C++/C#.

Me too, and a lot of people in multimedia/game industry that follow D from far. I know few person interested that put their eyes back to C++ immediately cause of GC (it's maybe too soon).

>> That's a shame, I see that as one of it's greatest (yet unrealised)
>> potentials. What are some other reasons anyone would reach for a
>> native language these days?
>
> Scalable, low resource, servers. Servers that boot up real fast and
> handle many connections.
>
> I am currently musing at OSv. It is a kernel written in C++ that can run
> on top of KVM. Having something like Go or D on that platform could be
> interesting.
>
> Backing caches/databases/web services for low revenue mobile apps.
>
>> If it's not an operating system, or some enterprising web service... what
>> else commands native hardware access and performance than embedded
>> development in a *highly* aggressive and competitive industry?
>
> Again, I don't disagree.  *smooch*
>
> ;)

On 2/10/14, 4:04 AM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>" wrote:
> One hobby of mine is to read Intel/AMD CPU docs, raytracing papers and
> compiler stuff, and discussing those aspects and improving my
> understanding of those areas is fun. I am loosing hope in that direction
> for D, because I don't think D has anyone with a strong interest in
> project management that can drive it in that direction. The responses
> from the D leads shows signs, not of a lack of skills, but a lack of
> interest in project management "theory" (and unfortunately, that is an
> area where I know the theory quite well since I majored in that area).

Terrific. The challenge here is to adapt project management theory to the realities of a volunteer project.

> Instead of A.A. and W.B. going defensive (and yes it is painful to see
> your child get a needle in the foot at the doctor to get that vaccine
> that will keep the child healthy in the long term) they should try to
> get someone into the team of leads that has an interest in software
> development process and software process improvement.

We're not getting defensive here. Clearly we could and should move faster than we do, and there must be ways to be better at that. I'm all ears on advice on how to do better. I just have difficulty seeing how more management would help.


Andrei