On 11/14/2017 7:15 PM, solidstate1991 wrote:
> Walter Bright: What's the licensing state of DMC and OPTLINK?

Boost

> Can it made open-source?

Yes.

> If yes, we should patch in a COFF32/64 support, maybe even port it to D for easier development. I can spend some of my time working on the DLL support if needed.

You're welcome to do it, it's something I've been meaning to do anyway. Optlink will never support MsCoff, you'll realize that when you look at the source :-(

On Wednesday, 15 November 2017 at 03:15:04 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> After all this flaming about Windows, mobile devices (I personally prefer my desktop PC thanks to its "power", or at least what it used to left, thanks to long unemployment time and lack of income, have a Nokia Lumia which I cannot upgrade to W10 due to BS reasons, and I think open-source architectures will kill off the proprietary ARM and x86 in the long run, not the mobile platform the desktops/laptops(funny story is that my mother tried to ditch desktop multiple times for the mobile, then got back, same happened with one of my cousin after he realized that pay-to-win games suck)), can we get back on rails? While its true that Windows and desktop is losing its place, we need to support Windows on a much higher level as long as there's a large number of PCs out there. Game development would highly benefit from D thanks to its all-in-one approach, probably could cut a few millions off from AAA game development. Also audio-engineers are switching to Windows, thanks to Apple scrapping the IO on their products (I'm also a digital artist, have to stay with Windows due to drivers, software, and ease of use).

I just saw this post about the upcoming Lenovo/AT&T Moto Tab and thought of you:

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Lenovo-Moto-Tab-ATT-features_id99782

For $300, you can buy a tablet that lets you do everything you normally do on a tablet, plus watch TV on the go.  If you want to use it for work, you buy the bluetooth accessories shown in that embedded promo youtube video and you can do that too.  Want a screen in your kitchen, to control that optional speaker, watch recipe videos while you cook, and do video calls?  That's a fairly new use case you can try out too.

So for $300 or a bit more, depending on what accessories you get, you replace your laptop and TV, and have completely new things you can do.  While this effort is fairly ambitious- having watched movies on my tablet with family members, similar to how the family in the video does, I can attest that your arms get tired holding the tablet out front like they do- seems to me that mobile convergence is only increasing.

As for your mom and cousin going back to PCs, let me tell you about my own mom.  Five years ago, we were both using Windows laptops: her chunky laptop for her business, my Win7 ultrabook for coding and recreation.  Today, we both use Android tablets for these same uses- we're both on our second Android tablet now- plus she'll actually use her tablet at home now because a 10" tablet is nowhere as bulky as a Windows laptop.

She never typed much in her business use, mostly reading emails and other viewing, so the laptop keyboard was always superfluous, but she had to have one because almost nobody was selling tablets a decade ago when she got it.  Whereas, I paired a bluetooth keyboard with my tablet and get by just fine with that.

The sales data I've linked shows that there are a lot more people like us than those you point out, and my point is that the mobile market is encroaching even on to people like your family, with products like that Moto Tab.

btw, if you want to get back on-topic, simply change the topic of your post up top and write a post about the original topic, rather than posting in an OT thread about what we're talking about.

On Wednesday, 15 November 2017 at 11:46:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I just saw this post about the upcoming Lenovo/AT&T Moto Tab and thought of you:
>
> https://www.phonearena.com/news/Lenovo-Moto-Tab-ATT-features_id99782
>
> For $300, you can buy a tablet that lets you do everything you normally do on a tablet, plus watch TV on the go.  If you want to use it for work, you buy the bluetooth accessories shown in that embedded promo youtube video and you can do that too.  Want a screen in your kitchen, to control that optional speaker, watch recipe videos while you cook, and do video calls?  That's a fairly new use case you can try out too.
>
> So for $300 or a bit more, depending on what accessories you get, you replace your laptop and TV, and have completely new things you can do.  While this effort is fairly ambitious- having watched movies on my tablet with family members, similar to how the family in the video does, I can attest that your arms get tired holding the tablet out front like they do- seems to me that mobile convergence is only increasing.
>
> As for your mom and cousin going back to PCs, let me tell you about my own mom.  Five years ago, we were both using Windows laptops: her chunky laptop for her business, my Win7 ultrabook for coding and recreation.  Today, we both use Android tablets for these same uses- we're both on our second Android tablet now- plus she'll actually use her tablet at home now because a 10" tablet is nowhere as bulky as a Windows laptop.
>
> She never typed much in her business use, mostly reading emails and other viewing, so the laptop keyboard was always superfluous, but she had to have one because almost nobody was selling tablets a decade ago when she got it.  Whereas, I paired a bluetooth keyboard with my tablet and get by just fine with that.
>
> The sales data I've linked shows that there are a lot more people like us than those you point out, and my point is that the mobile market is encroaching even on to people like your family, with products like that Moto Tab.
>
> btw, if you want to get back on-topic, simply change the topic of your post up top and write a post about the original topic, rather than posting in an OT thread about what we're talking about.

I'm thinking on picking up some Android tablet for development purposes, would be good to port my game engine for mobile devices, probably have to resort for OpenGL for graphics acceleration instead of using CPU blitter, although that might work under NEON (currently I'm using SSE2).

On Wednesday, 15 November 2017 at 04:34:09 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/14/2017 7:15 PM, solidstate1991 wrote:
>> Walter Bright: What's the licensing state of DMC and OPTLINK?
>
> Boost
>
>> Can it made open-source?
>
> Yes.
>
>> If yes, we should patch in a COFF32/64 support, maybe even port it to D for easier development. I can spend some of my time working on the DLL support if needed.
>
> You're welcome to do it, it's something I've been meaning to do anyway. Optlink will never support MsCoff, you'll realize that when you look at the source :-(

It's filled with Assembly code, and otherwise not very readable. Would need a lot of work, I don't think it would worth it. Let's hope that MS will allow us to distribute a linker alongside DMD.

On Thursday, 16 November 2017 at 23:03:41 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 November 2017 at 11:46:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> [...]
>
> I'm thinking on picking up some Android tablet for development purposes, would be good to port my game engine for mobile devices, probably have to resort for OpenGL for graphics acceleration instead of using CPU blitter, although that might work under NEON (currently I'm using SSE2).

Great!  Let me know if you have any problem using ldc to compile for Android.  One caveat, ldc only supports 32-bit ARM chips right now.  I've been looking into making it work with 64-bit ARM, but I'm not sure exactly what that platform's doing for TLS and llvm will require some modification to make it work with D on AArch64.  David has been working on linux/AArch64, you're welcome to chip into that effort if you like:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2153

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 02:01:41 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 November 2017 at 04:34:09 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> [...]
>
> It's filled with Assembly code, and otherwise not very readable. Would need a lot of work, I don't think it would worth it. Let's hope that MS will allow us to distribute a linker alongside DMD.

If you want to help with that, I suggest you see what Go is doing and submit a PR for us to do the same:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/bwtknbuhnmadpspaccyt@forum.dlang.org

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 02:01:41 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
> It's filled with Assembly code, and otherwise not very readable. Would need a lot of work, I don't think it would worth it. Let's hope that MS will allow us to distribute a linker alongside DMD.

The more promising avenue would probably be to distribute LLD with DMD. This still leaves the system library licensing to deal with, but if I remember correctly, one of the usual suspects (Rainer? Vladimir?) was working on generating them from MinGW headers.

 — David

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 23:31:07 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> The more promising avenue would probably be to distribute LLD This still leaves the system library licensing to deal with, but if I remember correctly, one of the usual suspects (Rainer? Vladimir?) was working on generating them from MinGW headers.

Most of the core.sys.windows package is now based on the win32 package from the bindings project. The license header of the D files used from there claim that they were placed in the public domain, and I believe they were originally translated from the MinGW headers.

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 23:31:07 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> The more promising avenue would probably be to distribute LLD with DMD. This still leaves the system library licensing to deal with, but if I remember correctly, one of the usual suspects (Rainer? Vladimir?) was working on generating them from MinGW headers.
>
>  — David

Btw, what about LIBC from DMC, is it open source now too? Can we use it with DMD?

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 23:35:49 UTC, MrSmith wrote:
> On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 23:31:07 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
>> The more promising avenue would probably be to distribute LLD with DMD. This still leaves the system library licensing to deal with, but if I remember correctly, one of the usual suspects (Rainer? Vladimir?) was working on generating them from MinGW headers.
>>
>>  — David
>
> Btw, what about LIBC from DMC, is it open source now too? Can we use it with DMD?

No, but there is some talk of doing something about it in a more recent thread:

http://forum.dlang.org/post/ovj98g$26r9$1@digitalmars.com

On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 23:31:07 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Friday, 17 November 2017 at 02:01:41 UTC, solidstate1991 wrote:
>> It's filled with Assembly code, and otherwise not very readable. Would need a lot of work, I don't think it would worth it. Let's hope that MS will allow us to distribute a linker alongside DMD.
>
> The more promising avenue would probably be to distribute LLD with DMD. This still leaves the system library licensing to deal with, but if I remember correctly, one of the usual suspects (Rainer? Vladimir?) was working on generating them from MinGW headers.
>
>  — David

You still need C startup code.