On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 08:41:13PM +0000, Ali via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> I dont know what is it exactly about D that drive so many people to have that much sympathy for it

Maybe, just maybe, D does a lot of things right, in spite of doing a few
things wrong (that people love to pick on and complain about)? ;-)

What I can't explain, though, is why people who purportedly hate D and think it's DOA still linger around the D forums for some reason, and spend a lot of time and energy writing about why D sux.  Instead of, y'know, moving on to Rust and living happily ever after, or something. What's keeping them here?  Maybe they secretly love D and just can't admit it to themselves? :-P  OR maybe they just have too much time on their hands that could have been spent, I dunno, writing Rust or something.  Really makes one wonder why they aren't spending their time writing code in a better (according to them) language rather than complaining about a language they purportedly don't like, in a forum dedicated to that language.  It's puzzling.


T

-- 
First Rule of History: History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.

On Friday, 28 October 2022 at 21:11:00 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 08:41:13PM +0000, Ali via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>> I dont know what is it exactly about D that drive so many people to have that much sympathy for it
>
> Maybe, just maybe, D does a lot of things right, in spite of doing a few
> things wrong (that people love to pick on and complain about)? ;-)
>
> What I can't explain, though, is why people who purportedly hate D and think it's DOA still linger around the D forums for some reason, and spend a lot of time and energy writing about why D sux.  Instead of, y'know, moving on to Rust and living happily ever after, or something. What's keeping them here?  Maybe they secretly love D and just can't admit it to themselves? :-P  OR maybe they just have too much time on their hands that could have been spent, I dunno, writing Rust or something.  Really makes one wonder why they aren't spending their time writing code in a better (according to them) language rather than complaining about a language they purportedly don't like, in a forum dedicated to that language.  It's puzzling.
>
>
> T

Maybe dissapointment that hopes were not justified..
Long time no hear from Chris :) He was angry about breaking changes with new version of compiler and that he had to rewrite his >100k loc project if I remember correctly.

I've seen also similar example - one member was part of D-community and wrote some projects in D and put his time and effort (making projects, bug reports). But after that he lost his hope or maybe some other bad experience, or just other tools resolve his problems.
Now everytime when he see on one IT-news website, if someone mentioning D in the comments - he make a lot of replies how D is bad, that some bugs (his bugs) have not fixed more than 10 years.
On question "why so serious and negative?" - he is answering that at first he was ambassador of D, but it was big waste of his time and he would like to save others from this fate.

On 10/28/2022 2:51 AM, Imperatorn wrote:
> And still, people still think Zig is better for some reason.

Zig has very good marketing.

The best thing we can do, is simply write articles about the programs we write in D.

Submit presentation proposals at conferences other than DConf help a *lot*. And the people who have presented at DConf in the past already have presentations ready to go. Please just submit them!

Even for CPPCON. Submit a proposal about interfacing D to C++.

Or do one of those youtube videos showing yourself developing a D program.

On 10/28/2022 3:20 AM, IGotD- wrote:
> D is a good language but it has some obvious flaws that are easily recognizable and these can be fixed. The problem is the management and the total tone deafness/insight who refuse to recognize these often because of self manufactured dogmas. This is really frustrating as if the odds and ends could be fixed in the language it could bring it to a very competitive state. It's like falling over right before the finishing line. The only way out of this is if D is forked.

You can fork it if you like. Feel free!

Meanwhile, last week I spent fixing some gaps in the XMM semantics (relational operators are now supported).

Before that, I went through every DIP1000 bugzilla issue, and submitted PRs for the problems.

Before that, I went through (again) the list of outstanding issues with ImportC and fixed the top problems.

On 10/28/2022 7:09 AM, ryuukk_ wrote:
> i dab with zig a little, even thought i hate its ergonomics, it has the features that matter to me as builtin language feature

zig doesn't have a gc. D's gc is optional.

> i want D to grow, and it starts by acknowledging your shortcomings

> a GC that is slower than GO's GC

And I acknowledge that. It will never be as fast as GO's GC. The reason is a technical one. GO is a GC-only language, which means it is optimized for the GC. All GO allocations are allocated on the GC heap, although it does do escape analysis to figure out what can be allocated on the stack instead. (Java does this as well.)

With such heavy GC allocation, a reasonable tradeoff is to insert "write gates" on every write through a pointer. This informs the GC that the allocation is "dirty" and so can be moved to more recently used places. These write gates slow the code down, but they speed up the GC even more, and so they are worth while.

The GO GC can also take advantage of always knowing exactly where all the GC pointers are, because there are only GC pointers. This enables a moving GC, which "compacts" fragmented memory.

When GC is optional, or used rather rarely, as in D, the write gate technique is a net loser. The GC is sped up at the cost of slowing everything else down. And since there are all kinds of pointers in D, one no longer can use a moving GC allocator, because it cannot know exactly where 100% of the GC pointers are.

If there was a way around these two issues, we would have found it by now. But by adding write gates, and making GC pointers the only pointers, D won't be systems programming language anymore.

So why does D have a GC at all?

1. It enables a killer feature - CTFE that can allocate memory. C++ doesn't do that. Zig doesn't do that.

2. Choice is nice. For example, I prefer to use the GC for initialization work, and the inner loop gets manual allocation. I get the best of both.