On Sunday, 11 June 2023 at 19:33:42 UTC, Rune Morling wrote:
> How come? Mike is saying you're more than welcome to state your case? Are you suggesting that you'll only bother to do so if it's a foregone conclusion that it'll indeed happen?
No. I am suggesting that there is no reason to believe that this "meeting" is going to be productive in any way. What going to happen is, I will join the meeting, and then get reiterated everything that's already been said here. Things like:
> It's just that I can't see how it would be effective.
If Walter can't see how it would be effective, and actually directly disagreeing with me:
> Making LTS versions balkanizes the language into multiple languages, which will play hell with 3rd party library maintenance.
How can I convince him otherwise? Just say "no u wrong"? This isn't going to work. Or, rather, why would I even bother convincing him, when a clearly better solution for me would be to simply switch languages. Where I wouldn't even need to support a GUI library to have one.
I have already said that, IMO, to understand my point, core D should try supporting some of the 3rd party. Maybe then they'll have to deal with all that versioning stuff. And maybe then they'll realize that LTS is needed. After all, there are things you can't understand until you're struck by them.
> That seems an odd tack to take for something you apparently feel quite strongly about?
Some develop the langauge, some use the language. I'm not a language developer, and I don't intend on becoming one. If I wanted to, I'd just make my own language. Because there is only this much resistance I'm willing to go through for free. I have my daily job (in D!), but I'm still willing to commit in ways that can be found productive by both parties. Arguing with Walter isn't something I'm going to do, even for money.
As someone said in this thread previously, D is heavily biased towards language developers, not language users.
> From my limited perspective, the ideal case here is LDC and GDC working together on the de facto LTS versions re. backporting important patches it seems. I'll leave the discussion of how that could work to more knowledgeable people.
From my limited perspective, GDC is awful and is not good for production. Then again, it's not like any other D compiler is "good enough", maybe LDC is. But anyway, in practice, GDC is a rare beast and most people use DMD/LDC. Maybe if GDC is promoted as "default" D compiler, then yes, we're getting there. But this wasn't suggested by anyone from the D team. They don't even want to spend 5 to 10 minutes coming up with ideas on my direct question:
> What is your take, what will allow us to have an LTS branch?
So, again, there's simply nothing to discuss. I'm not big into how D team internals work, so how can I know what they want/need.
> In other words: This is really close to happening is my impression. Why wouldn't you want to be one of the people helping to bring it over the goal line re. DLF buy-in so you actually get what you were after in the first place?
Contributing to any open-source project isn't a privilege. At least it shouldn't be, in my opinion. Especially, when everyone is saying how they "lack manpower". But when issues are brought up, they just resort to "nah" or "do it yourself". And even when you do it yourself, you end up in pages of useless arguing and very little productive being achieved. Or even your commits being reverted sigh
It's not that I expect D team to go and magically fix all my issues, and I never implied that. I'm jsut a language user crying for help coming up with a proposal to improve the language. I don't have expertise to be a language developer. And I sure don't expect blatant disagreeing and responsibility dodging from the D team. What I expect is:
- Understanding the problem
- Proposing a possible solution with a list of requirments
- Analyzing possible pitfalls to discuss
Only then a meeting is necessary. Those 3 steps can easily be discussed in a forum post without wasting everyone's time with pointless banter. I outlined the preconditions for (actually any) meeting:
> I am willing to come to the meeting, fine, but only after some common ground is found on
topics of:
Needing LTS in the first place
Requirments and prerequisites for such an event
Your (D team's) proposition on how such thing could be achieved, and what resources are necessary for it
Otherwise (I'm probably repeating myself too much) there's simply nothing to talk about. It will be a stupid, pointless, phylosophical debate with nothing productive being achieved.
You can read this as: I'm a user that is willing to contribute, but I'm not going to spend my time begging and arguing, because there are other languages. I already spent enough time trying to do good things for D, and there is a decent chunk of sunk cost fallacy, but this can't go on forever. What angries me the most is how everyone is blatantly ignorant about users that they lose. For the love of everything that's holy, I already started my most recent project in C++, because it's just easier, despite everything bad about the language.
Take this with a little grain of salt, because I already stopped beginning projects in D. LTS isn't even the only problem with the language. It's one of the many that make D actually unusable in modern day programming. Unfortunately, none of them are being addressed.
P.S. I still don't understand why D team expects people to spend hours and days to get very little done in regards of productivity. Despite how many people have left because of those reasons. I don't understand why D treats 3rd party developers as morons/idiots/non-importnat people (please select the correct one), and why they still make no effort to support said 3rd party. Modern day programming is impossible without third-party. Because people would rather deal with C++ that has everything, than enjoy D that has nothing. (and it's not like D is really an enjoyable language to begin with)