On 27/06/2020 9:05 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
> The bad things around big medical companies is that they tend to tie your hands with a pletora of NDA agreements ... I've literally lost the count around how many I've signed!
> 
> What I can tell is that it's driving a depth camera, and mixing data in realtime received by an eye-tracker device.

Strip out all the medical bits and with just that, could you make a demo of D being used in it?

It could be a good time to try out some new hardware to throw people off the trail ;)

Tech is cool, regardless of how its being used in practice.

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 20:58:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Search on "desktop computer". On the left, you'll find a CPU menu. No ARM processors in it. Neither for Amazon.

Yeah, ARM's primary competitive advantage over x86 is lower power consumption, which means they are biased toward the portable market. There are still various wall-outlet arm devices, especially single-board computers (SBC for short) like the raspberry pi and pine64, but they are still a different form-factor than the traditional desktop... probably just because there's no actual need for them to be larger, and while many new x86 devices don't need much space either, arm devices don't have the same traditional history to push it out of habit either.

They also tend to be sold in those single board forms rather than individual components for DIYers who don't like the big brands, so instead of getting a CPU on newegg, you'd just order an all-in-one board and a case for it.

Anyway, whether wall-power SBC, or one of the portable options like a laptop or phone, you can connect them to all the same accessories to give a desktop experience: keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor, and not know the difference unless you look under the cover for a great many tasks.

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 22:23:21 UTC, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 27/06/2020 9:05 AM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>> The bad things around big medical companies is that they tend to tie your hands with a pletora of NDA agreements ... I've literally lost the count around how many I've signed!
>> 
>> What I can tell is that it's driving a depth camera, and mixing data in realtime received by an eye-tracker device.
>
> Strip out all the medical bits and with just that, could you make a demo of D being used in it?
>
> It could be a good time to try out some new hardware to throw people off the trail ;)
>
> Tech is cool, regardless of how its being used in practice.

Oh, but there's really nothing special about it: D "just works".

Looking at the gitlab CI script, the project started with ldc-1.13.0, so it's not really a 'new thing' ... curl, source activate, ldmd2 -I, et voilà!

On 6/26/2020 2:00 PM, rikki cattermole wrote:
> Could you do a D blog article on what you do with it?
> 
> It would be a good show of application of D.

Yes, please. The D Foundation will also pay for articles accepted for publication on the blog!

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 20:43:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/26/2020 2:18 AM, aberba wrote:
>> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 01:25:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 6/24/2020 4:21 AM, aberba wrote:
>>>> PC was the only compelling target for Intel/Amd targets but now its changing.
>>>
>>> Search for "arm computer" on newegg.com:
>>>
>>> https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=arm+computer
>>>
>>> :-)
>> 
>> Just did. Don't get your point.
>
> Not a single computer powered by an ARM CPU shows up.
>
> Amazon doesn't have any, either.
>
> Neither even have ARM in their CPU category.

Sorry, but this is a D typical way of answering to such issues. Put your blinders on and say that it's not an issue, all is good. ARM has been an issue for quite a while and it was obvious years ago that there would be more and more ARM in the future. Things are going in this direction (small devices etc.)

Adam gave you a good answer. He's right. And things may change quite fast. Look at Steve, he wants to buy an "old" MacBook in order to have time to transition to ARM. It is urgent and you have to act now. I hope you don't think that if people have enough skin in the game (i.e. their livelihood), then somebody will step up and tackle it. No, this is the job of the DLF. You should be glad that the LDC crowd has done a fantastic job already. Do you understand that their work might actually save D one day? I strongly advise you to make ARM a top priority, maybe not with DMD, but with a package (LDC / GDC) that makes for a smooth development experience and is future proof - not as a community project (as people might just leave for various reasons) but as a LTS project managed directly by the DLF (like DMD).

On 27/06/2020 6:53 PM, Paolo Invernizzi wrote:
>>
>> It could be a good time to try out some new hardware to throw people off the trail ;)
>>
>> Tech is cool, regardless of how its being used in practice.
> 
> Oh, but there's really nothing special about it: D "just works".
> 
> Looking at the gitlab CI script, the project started with ldc-1.13.0, so it's not really a 'new thing' ... curl, source activate, ldmd2 -I, et voilà!

I have never done anything like this, so to me this is really cool to see D being used like this!

On Saturday, 27 June 2020 at 08:45:25 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/26/2020 2:00 PM, rikki cattermole wrote:
>> Could you do a D blog article on what you do with it?
>> 
>> It would be a good show of application of D.
>
> Yes, please. The D Foundation will also pay for articles accepted for publication on the blog!

Thanks for the encouragement Walter, but I'm a bad and boring writer ... and short of time in this period!

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 20:43:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/26/2020 2:18 AM, aberba wrote:
>> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 01:25:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 6/24/2020 4:21 AM, aberba wrote:
>>>> PC was the only compelling target for Intel/Amd targets but now its changing.
>>>
>>> Search for "arm computer" on newegg.com:
>>>
>>> https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=arm+computer
>>>
>>> :-)
>> 
>> Just did. Don't get your point.
>
> Not a single computer powered by an ARM CPU shows up.
>
> Amazon doesn't have any, either.
>
> Neither even have ARM in their CPU category.

apple is / will be shipping $500 dev kits w/ an A10z; might be seriously worth looking into if anyone wanted to try doing compiler and/or toolchain work on arm

https://developer.apple.com/programs/universal/

addendum:

yes, this means you'd be stuck w/ an apple dev kit (and need to be a registered apple developer so the full cost of getting this is ~$600)

but this is probably your best bet, by far, for getting a full, working developer environment on an arm chipset atm, outside of running an old surface tablet w/ windows RT, or running a linux distro off a phone, or something.

Apple's implementation of this is running full mac os, with probably one of the fastest arm chipsets out atm

And it can run x86_64 code using an emulation layer (which I'm guessing is mostly just binary recompilation to arm, or something), which... obviously neither of the other two options can do afaik

Geekbench, supposedly, is running on it (and w/ the x64 version), and it benchmarks pretty darn close to a 4-5 year old i5 / i7 laptop (source: have a 5 year old laptop w/ an i7 4980hq, and the dev kit's benchmarks are shockingly close to that)

it'd be pretty interesting to see if dmd can run on this out of the box, and what problems (if any) there might be with that. (intrinsics? threading? runtime code modification??)

For porting bits of dmd and/or druntime and/or toolchain stuff to arm, I'm not sure you could do better than working on a pretty powerful arm chip that can run both arm *and* x86_64 code

You'd be stuck w/ macos ofc, but I'm pretty sure you could do quite a bit worse on that front in terms of having a real, working desktop development environment, that can run real dev tools and w/ performance that will probably not suck. no visual studio, but eh, vscode should work (hopefully), and there's intellij stuff. and there's xcode, which... if nothing else has pretty good debugging and profiling tools, and can be run on d binaries if you're sufficiently motivated and/or desperate

On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 22:46:53 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 26 June 2020 at 20:58:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Search on "desktop computer". On the left, you'll find a CPU menu. No ARM processors in it. Neither for Amazon.
>
> Yeah, ARM's primary competitive advantage over x86 is lower power consumption, which means they are biased toward the portable market. There are still various wall-outlet arm devices, especially single-board computers (SBC for short) like the raspberry pi and pine64, but they are still a different form-factor than the traditional desktop... probably just because there's no actual need for them to be larger, and while many new x86 devices don't need much space either, arm devices don't have the same traditional history to push it out of habit either.
>
> They also tend to be sold in those single board forms rather than individual components for DIYers who don't like the big brands, so instead of getting a CPU on newegg, you'd just order an all-in-one board and a case for it.
>
> Anyway, whether wall-power SBC, or one of the portable options like a laptop or phone, you can connect them to all the same accessories to give a desktop experience: keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor, and not know the difference unless you look under the cover for a great many tasks.

ARM is everywhere, the entire computer industry and internet hangs off devices with ARM cores. This is not true for Intel. For the last 5 yrs the entire embedded industry has moved towards ARM. Apple are just jumping on the bandwagon :-)

Any device running software that was manufactured in the last 5 yrs will likely have an ARM core in there somewhere. Even in a desktop in the PSU or motherboard. More recent AMD x86 CPUs have an ARM core in the silicon. All those ARM cores are running software and that production software is currently C or C++11 (or higher).

The current trend for embedded is C++14 with GCC or IAR compilers. Prior to C++11 the industry was stuck in its ways with C, but C++11 and the committee direction has really changed all that. There are teams that still insist on C only but they are becoming less and less.

Rust is starting to gain a lot of traction in embedded as the alternative language for production code. Most people I talk with at trade shows and conferences like that the compiler shouts loudly a them if they do something considered unsafe by the language. When I ask about the friction Rust introduces most say they get used to it and then begin to like it because they see all the noise is actually for good reasons. Frequent I hear comments like "once the code compiles I have a lot more confidence my program is memory safe and correct". This is not true for C++, even C++20 because there are so many corners in the language rules.

Sadly D isn't even on the radar, mostly because Rust marketing is so strong but also for those that do look at it there is no official ARM support. D could compete and do well in the embedded space with its feature set, low-friction like Python yet familiar C-like syntax.

Norm