On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 07:20:05 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> i'm guilty of this myself (ranting and so on), so i've been on both sides. when i just came to D, i've immediately noticed alot of obvious things that should be fixed for good, and sometimes wrote about that in "hey, listen to me, i know what to do!" manner. but as time passed, i've seen many other posts similar to mines. if it was so obvious, D devs must be really dumb to not see that by theirselves, right? and if they are so dumb, i don't think that they can program at all, so D just can't exist! but D exists, so something is wrong in this logical chain. ;-)

Nah, this just means that you have gotten used to the quirks and learned to work around them and therefore no longer notice them as much. That does not mean that newbie's are wrong in complaining about obstacles.

Lack of libraries is not the most reasonable thing to complain about, but language and tooling issues are fair game.

On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 07:53:13 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Nah, this just means that you have gotten used to the quirks and learned to work around them and therefore no longer notice them as much.

nope, i still hate all the things i hated years ago, with the same passion. after all, that's why i'm slowly working on aliced. ;-)

On Sunday, 3 July 2016 at 04:37:02 UTC, D is crap wrote:
[snip]

I seriously don't know what to make of this post. It's a random compilation of complaints made about D over the last couple of years that lacks depth and useful information. As such, it could be mere trolling.

If the poster on the other hand is sincere, then I suppose s/he's a programming novice that is confused and put off by anything that doesn't have an IDE to hold his or her hand at every step - which is not uncommon. But to get going with D you just need `dmd` and a text editor, possibly `dub` for convenience. IMO, D doesn't need IDE's as much as other languages (Java needs an IDE because of tons of boiler plate, C++ because of C++).

Also, error messages are often the same, so after a while you know exactly what's wrong when a certain message appears. This is also true of Objective-C, C, Java etc. If compilation fails immediately, it's most likely a syntax error and you will see something like  `Error: found '{' when expecting ')'` somewhere. A bit of patience and common sense can get you a long way.

The reason why this post is not taken too seriously is not because people here are religious about D - a reproach that is often used to prevent any real discussion. No, it is because it sounds like an amazon review where someone ordered a book in a foreign language and gives it one star saying "I'm a beginner and the vocabulary used is too difficult, this book sucks!" Sorry, but that's how it came across to me.

On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 09:37:41 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Sunday, 3 July 2016 at 04:37:02 UTC, D is crap wrote:
> The reason why this post is not taken too seriously is not because people here are religious about D - a reproach that is often used to prevent any real discussion. No, it is because it sounds like an amazon review where someone ordered a book in a foreign language and gives it one star saying "I'm a beginner and the vocabulary used is too difficult, this book sucks!" Sorry, but that's how it came across to me.

When I read this post I tought the same.

On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 09:37:41 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Sunday, 3 July 2016 at 04:37:02 UTC, D is crap wrote:
> [snip]
>
> I seriously don't know what to make of this post. It's a random compilation of complaints made about D over the last couple of years that lacks depth and useful information. As such, it could be mere trolling.
>
> [...]

Probably the realest post on this forum.

On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 07:58:29 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 07:53:13 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Nah, this just means that you have gotten used to the quirks and learned to work around them and therefore no longer notice them as much.
>
> nope, i still hate all the things i hated years ago, with the same passion. after all, that's why i'm slowly working on aliced. ;-)

But that is actually good news, I thought you had lost your spark of passion ;-).

On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 16:25:24 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> But that is actually good news, I thought you had lost your spark of passion ;-).

i lost interest in trying to improve mainline: it is more like C++ now, with legacy features "untouchable", and new breaking features unwelcome. while i understand the reasons, i still hate 'em as much as i always hated 'em.

so i still have various branches in aliced repo, where i'm trying various features (or feature cuts ;-). and eventually promoting some of them to "main aliced". like -- i really can't understand how people is writing code without named arguments. or, rather, i *can* understand, and it is PITA. from the other side -- reviving `typedef` was too much work, so we lost it.

On Monday, 4 July 2016 at 16:25:24 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
p.s. as nobody in his sane mind is not reading this thread anymore, i can even reveal that my work on SSA-based backend is not completely stalled. it will be universal library, but i'm planning to augment DMD with it too. while i don't think that it will be better than current dmd codegen, it will generate "good enough" code without optimizations. and yeah, non-proprietary license too. and, maybe, CTFE jitted with the same backend.

ambitious plans, i know, but hey! also, with this new backend aliced may finally leave underground and present herself to the world! ;-)

as for the current state -- library does basic copy elimination, value spilling and register selection. so it's not just a daydreaming. ;-)

On Tuesday, 5 July 2016 at 05:14:48 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> anymore, i can even reveal that my work on SSA-based backend is not completely stalled. it will be universal library, but i'm planning to augment DMD with it too. while i don't think that it will be better than current dmd codegen, it will generate "good enough" code without optimizations. and yeah, non-proprietary license too. and, maybe, CTFE jitted with the same backend.

Sounds like a good project. A non-optimizing backend that retains type information and asserts could be very useful. And keeping it simple is valuable, it makes it easier for others to understand the front-end/back-end connection.

> ambitious plans, i know, but hey! also, with this new backend aliced may finally leave underground and present herself to the world! ;-)

Hey, I'm sure others will chime in on code-gen, just for fun.

> as for the current state -- library does basic copy elimination, value spilling and register selection. so it's not just a daydreaming. ;-)

:-)

On Tuesday, 5 July 2016 at 06:27:17 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> Sounds like a good project. A non-optimizing backend that retains type information and asserts could be very useful. And keeping it simple is valuable, it makes it easier for others to understand the front-end/back-end connection.

but... but it IS optimizing backend! once i have SSA, i can do alot of optimizations on that -- i just didn't implemented 'em all, but it doesn't matter. and any such optimizations are completely independent of frontend code anyway.