On 27/08/2018 4:09 AM, lurker wrote:
> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 14:17:33 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 14:00:56 UTC, nkm1 wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> What did I expect? Better: What do I expect now. I've been using D for years now. I think it's time for D to offer users the same stability as other languages do. Simple as.
> 
> lurking around this board for a long time and gave up on d2 along time ago. it is to scripty. i can not convince anybody at work to use it even for small things under windows. some tried it and they say it is to buggy, misses windows essentials and there seems to be no chance of betterment via management or the compiler enthusiasts that rather implement any fancy fart instead of getting the compiler stable, bug free and usable.
> it seems like this is a language experiment, unusable for serious development.
> i just downloaded current beta 2 and visual D. installs ok, no detection of visual studio or any of the associated paths. visual D installed ok, but a click on menu options killed visual studio.
> i uninstalled successfully - hallelujah.
> so i lurk around for an other year an see if D experiment is still around and/or usable.

Both VisualD and dmd should work out of the box with MSVC and Visual Studio. In the last year I have not seen any reports of either failing out-right without something wrong with the users environment making it problematic.

So please report any issues you're having. Because they are not regular user experience.

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 16:25:31 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 27/08/2018 4:09 AM, lurker wrote:
>> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 14:17:33 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 14:00:56 UTC, nkm1 wrote:

> So please report any issues you're having. Because they are not regular user experience.

i did - and lost interest. right now i'd rather use a modern BASIC, because the install works and the compiler too.

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 16:25:31 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 27/08/2018 4:09 AM, lurker wrote:
>> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 14:17:33 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> lurking around this board for a long time and gave up on d2 along time ago. it is to scripty. i can not convince anybody at work to use it even for small things under windows. some tried it and they say it is to buggy, misses windows essentials and there seems to be no chance of betterment via management or the compiler enthusiasts that rather implement any fancy fart instead of getting the compiler stable, bug free and usable.
>> it seems like this is a language experiment, unusable for serious development.
>> i just downloaded current beta 2 and visual D. installs ok, no detection of visual studio or any of the associated paths. visual D installed ok, but a click on menu options killed visual studio.
>> i uninstalled successfully - hallelujah.
>> so i lurk around for an other year an see if D experiment is still around and/or usable.
>
> Both VisualD and dmd should work out of the box with MSVC and Visual Studio. In the last year I have not seen any reports of either failing out-right without something wrong with the users environment making it problematic.
>
> So please report any issues you're having. Because they are not regular user experience.

The first five minutes of VisualD and DUB are rough!
Consecutively they shun me away a lot of the time.

I'm also lurking on the forums for all of D's promises, but it doesn't seem productively useable outside of isolated projects whitout tightly locked down dependencies and the ability to maintain your own compiler and libraries.
It might be in practise, but it certainly doesn't look to be so.

https://forum.dlang.org/post/ydggepqkufeqaauoicsz@forum.dlang.org

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 13:40:17 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 08:40:32 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
>> [...]
>
> No. Nobody forces you to use the latest version that may have an improved GC, new library functions or bug fixes. In fact, why bother with improving the language at all? But how do you feel about code that you've been compiling with, say dmd 2.071.2 for years now - including workarounds for compiler bugs? Doesn't the thought of having to upgrade it one day bother you at all? What if your customer said that 2.08++ had better features asking you to use them?
>
> The burden of finding paths to handle deprecations etc. is on the user, not the language developers. And this is where the psychological factor that Laeeth was talking about comes in. If you're constantly programming thinking "Whatever I write today might break tomorrow, uh, and what about the code I wrote in 2016? Well, I'll have to upgrade it one day, when I have time. I'll just keep on using an older version of dmd for now. Yeah, no, I cannot benefit from the latest improvements but at least it compiles with dmd2.st0neage. But why worry, I'll just have to get used to the fact that I have different code for different versions, for now...and forever."
>
> You can get used to anything until you find out that it doesn't need to be this way. You write unexciting Java code and hey, it works and it always will. It took me a while to understand why Java has been so successful, but now I know. It's not write once, run everywhere. It's write once, run forever. Stability, predictability. And maybe that's why Java, Go and once C++ prefer a slower pace.
>
> I just don't understand why it is so hard to understand the points I and others have made. It's not rocket science, but maybe this is the problem, because I already see, the point to take home is: There are no real problems, we are just imagining them. Real world experience doesn't count, because we just don't see the bigger picture which is the eternal glory of academic discussions about half baked features of an eternally unfinished language that keeps changing randomly. Not practical, but intellectually satisfying.

I reaĺly like new features, for new projects I also consider to use the latest stable dmd version (2.xx.1 or 2.xx.2) if there aren't any known issues.
For legacy coding I do the math: does the new features, gc improvements,... worth the time = money. I can also decide to upgrade every 5 releases, but only if it worth the investment.

I want to stress, the upgrade is fully in the hand of the developer and the decision can be made on costs and benefits.

My opinion might be very optimistic, but I feel some opinions in this thread are rather pessimistic.

Kind regards
Andre

On 26.08.2018 19:45, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote:
> 
> The first five minutes of VisualD and DUB are rough!
> Consecutively they shun me away a lot of the time.
> 
> I'm also lurking on the forums for all of D's promises, but it doesn't seem productively useable outside of isolated projects whitout tightly locked down dependencies and the ability to maintain your own compiler and libraries.
> It might be in practise, but it certainly doesn't look to be so.
> 
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/ydggepqkufeqaauoicsz@forum.dlang.org

I use D heavily 6+ years and based on my experience I can state it is highly productive language comparing to C/C++ I work with too. In D I can do more than in C/C++. C is too low level and so verbose, C++ lacks for some metaprogramming features and it's less consistent than D.

It's rather funny to see how one man who forced to program in programming language he doesn't like can triggers comments from lurkers that they don't like D too. No offense.
D is in great form and is getting much better and better and I'd like to ask D community to continue their good work and make D great again.

On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 17:12:53 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> This is probably completely unrealistic, but I've been thinking about the possibility of adding *all* D codebases to the CI infrastructure, including personal projects and what-not.

You mean more than what's already covered by the project tester?

https://ci.dlang.io/blue/organizations/jenkins/dlang-org%2Fci/detail/master/159/pipeline/

Anyone can add their project:

https://github.com/dlang/ci/blob/38f10275e56b046acad1b9a9b4ecc8bd771e096d/vars/runPipeline.groovy#L457

Some issues for why we can't add *all* D codebases:

- We also care about generated code, not just whether it compiles; that means, running the project's tests. However, some tests are flaky (they access network resources or have race conditions).

- When we want to deprecate language/library features, they need to be removed from tested code. That means that the project author/maintainer needs to be in the loop and update their code when we "break it on purpose".

- Some code or tests are just outright broken, i.e. depending on undefined behavior, like order of iteration of associative arrays. (Guilty of that one!)

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 05:55:47 UTC, Pjotr Prins wrote:
> Artem wrote Sambamba as a student
>
>     https://github.com/biod/sambamba
>
> and it is now running around the world in sequencing centers. Many many CPU hours and a resulting huge carbon foot print. The large competing C++ samtools project has been trying for 8 years to catch up with an almost unchanged student project and they are still slower in many cases.
> 
> [snip]
>
> Note that Artem used the GC and only took GC out for critical sections in parallel code. I don't buy these complaints about GC.
>
> The complaints about breaking code I don't see that much either. Sambamba pretty much kept compiling over the years and with LDC/LLVM latest we see a 20% perfomance increase. For free (at least from our perspective). Kudos to LDC/LLVM efforts!!

This sounds very similar to my experiences with the tsv utilities, on most of the same points (development simplicity, comparative performance, GC use, LDC). Data processing apps may well be a sweet spot. See my DConf talk for an overview (https://github.com/eBay/tsv-utils/blob/master/docs/dconf2018.pdf).

Though not mentioned in the talk, I also haven't had any significant issues with new compiler releases. May have be related to the type of code being written. Regarding the GC - The throughput oriented nature of data processing tools like the tsv utilities looks like a very good fit for the current GC. Applications where low GC latency is needed may have different results. It'd be great to hear an experience report from development of an application where GC was used and low GC latency was a priority.

--Jon

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 18:18:04 UTC, drug wrote:
> It's rather funny to see how one man who forced to program in programming language he doesn't like can triggers comments from lurkers that they don't like D too. No offense.
> D is in great form and is getting much better and better and I'd like to ask D community to continue their good work and make D great again.

Most people lurking here are people that WANT to use D but are offset by the issues. D is not bad as a language but it has issue. Their are issues at every step in the D eco system and each of those create a barrier.

Its those same issues that never seem to get solved and are secondary citizens compared to adding more "future" features or trying to Up-one C++...

Its not BetterC or static if or whatever new feature of the month, that brings in new people. You can advertise D as much as you want, but when people download D and very few people stay, is that not a hint...

The fact that only recently the D Poll pointed out that most people are using VSC and not VS. I am like "what, you only figure that out now". Given the mass popularity of VSC... That alone tells you how much the mindset of D is stuck in a specific eco space.

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 16:09:35 UTC, lurker wrote:
> [...]

Yeah right... I'm sure this is what everyone experienced.

This thread has become the trollers trolling playground.

On Sun, 26 Aug 2018 at 12:10, RhyS via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 18:18:04 UTC, drug wrote:
> > It's rather funny to see how one man who forced to program in
> > programming language he doesn't like can triggers comments from
> > lurkers that they don't like D too. No offense.
> > D is in great form and is getting much better and better and
> > I'd like to ask D community to continue their good work and
> > make D great again.
>
> Most people lurking here are people that WANT to use D but are offset by the issues. D is not bad as a language but it has issue. Their are issues at every step in the D eco system and each of those create a barrier.
>
> Its those same issues that never seem to get solved and are secondary citizens compared to adding more "future" features or trying to Up-one C++...
>
> Its not BetterC or static if or whatever new feature of the month, that brings in new people. You can advertise D as much as you want, but when people download D and very few people stay, is that not a hint...
>
> The fact that only recently the D Poll pointed out that most people are using VSC and not VS. I am like "what, you only figure that out now". Given the mass popularity of VSC... That alone tells you how much the mindset of D is stuck in a specific eco space.

Industry tends to use VS, because they fork-out for the relatively
expensive licenses.
I work at a company with a thousand engineers, all VS users, D could
find home there if some rough edges were polished, but they
*absolutely must be polished* before it would be taken seriously.
It is consistently expressed that poor VS integration is an absolute
non-starter.

While a majority of people (hobbyists?) that take an online poll in an
open-source community forum might be VSCode users, that doesn't mean
VS is a poor priority target.
Is D a hobby project, or an industry solution? I vote the latter. I
don't GAF about peoples hobbies, I just want to use D to _do my job_.
Quality VS experience is critical to D's adoption in that sector.
Those 1000 engineers aren't reflected in your poll... would you like them to be?