On 08/04/2010 09:22 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>
> Walter is more silent than usual because he's working very hard on the
> 64-bit compiler. He hopes to have one by the end of this month. His next
> big goal is shared library support.

While those are both important, isn't it even more important to have the existing 32-bit implementation complete? How can you showcase a language that's incomplete and buggy? Can't both those features wait until after D2 is considered polished enough to be released?

I keep seeing reports from people running into bugs, unfinished features, and incomplete documentation. There's no end in sight, either, yet a book has been released and the language is promoted as if it were a finished product.

On 03/08/2010 23:31, bearophile wrote:
> BCS:
>
>> The video is up:
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlVpPstLPEc
>
> Thank you for the link and thank you to Andrei for the very nice talk. I think the link can be put on Reddit too, if not already present. When Andrei talks he seems a little different from the Andrei that writes in this newsgroup. The talk was quite interactive, and the idea of giving away books for good questions was a good one. The people in the room seem to know how to program.
>...
> In the time has taken me to see and comment the video the number of people that have seen it has gone from 3 to 322. This is a lot in a short time.
>
> Bye and thank you for the ride,
> bearophile

I'm a bit surprised, and positively so. The talk now has only less views than 2 videos of 2010 and I'm sure it will surpass these in due time, too. Seems like D is more popular and has more momentum left than I thought, after all.

Good to see and thanks for the nice talk Andrei.

/Max

== Quote from BCS (none@anon.com)'s article
> A possibly better solution would be to use an error handling strategy approach, Have the called function throw and exception supplied by the calling function.
> >

I wouldn't use this, at least without a sane default exception, because it forces the caller of a function to write boilerplate for error handling (beyond what's necessary for cleanup/rollback in case of an error) even if the caller can't actually handle the errors.  This severely smacks of overengineering and making the uncommon case possible at the expense of making the common case simple, and largely defeats two main purposes for exceptions:

1.  Noone should have to explicitly think about how to propagate any error.  One and only one level should have to think about handling it and the rest of the levels just need to be able to clean up in case of an error.

2.  Exceptions are supposed to provide a sane default that's useful for small scripts (exiting the program with a decent error message).  If you force the user to explicitly specify an exception to be thrown, you lose this convenience.

On the other hand, if you provide a sane default exception, this might be reasonable as long as it doesn't bloat the API too much.

== Quote from awishformore (awishformore@nospam.plz)'s article
> I'm a bit surprised, and positively so. The talk now has only less views than 2 videos of 2010 and I'm sure it will surpass these in due time, too.

Can you clarify this?  Relative to what?  All of YouTube (no way)?  All Google
Tech Talk videos?

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 5:38 PM, dsimcha <dsimcha@yahoo.com> wrote:

> == Quote from awishformore (awishformore@nospam.plz)'s article
> > I'm a bit surprised, and positively so. The talk now has only less views than 2 videos of 2010 and I'm sure it will surpass these in due time, too.
>
> Can you clarify this?  Relative to what?  All of YouTube (no way)?  All
> Google
> Tech Talk videos?
>

I only see some 5k views on that video. And there are videos with over 100k views from the google tech talk channel. Maybe it's shown on his personal page which makes it look like its a top video of 2010.

On 05/08/2010 17:55, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 5:38 PM, dsimcha <dsimcha@yahoo.com
> <mailto:dsimcha@yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     == Quote from awishformore (awishformore@nospam.plz)'s article
>      > I'm a bit surprised, and positively so. The talk now has only
>     less views
>      > than 2 videos of 2010 and I'm sure it will surpass these in due time,
>      > too.
>
>     Can you clarify this?  Relative to what?  All of YouTube (no way)?
>       All Google
>     Tech Talk videos?
>
>
> I only see some 5k views on that video. And there are videos with over
> 100k views from the google tech talk channel. Maybe it's shown on his
> personal page which makes it look like its a top video of 2010.

It's the third most watched video of all published google tech talks of 2010. Of course it's miles away from videos like Go with over 200k views, which is from 2009. I just found it nice to see that there is more interest in the google tech talk about D than in most other "normal" tech talks.

/Max

Jeff Nowakowski:
>I keep seeing reports from people running into bugs, unfinished features, and incomplete documentation. There's no end in sight, either, yet a book has been released and the language is promoted as if it were a finished product.<

A software product is "finished" some time after its death. Living languages are unfinished things.

And not all bug reports are born equal. Some of them are minor enhancement requests, other are important enhancement requests that put a patch on some important limit or problem, others are holes in the documentation, others are minor bugs, improvements for error messages or bugs that have some temporary workaround, others are bugs that hit very uncommon situations. Only a very small percentage of the bugs are both bad and very easy to stumble upon, and then there are problems that stop you from using the compiler on some operation system.

Don takes care of keeping an eye on the most important bugs, critical ones or blocking ones, and they slowly get addressed. As time passes and large things are fixed, the less important bugs will be filled, if in the meantime people have shown interest in D. As the D community grows (if D has success) more people will be able to spot bugs, submit patches, and more bugs will be fixed. In that moment Walter will need to delegate more, but the D community is not there yet. D is a C++-class language, it's a large language, and it's made of many parts, so there are probably thousands of bugs left to be fixed, but most of them are not critical :-) So far I have added more than 230 bug reports to Bugzilla, some of them are ugly crashes, etc, but only a small percentage of them are "important", probably less than 20.

--------------

Andrej Mitrovic:
> I only see some 5k views on that video.

5k views in few days is a lot. So there is surely some interest toward D. C++ is slowly becoming a niche language, but it's a large niche still, and it's years that people try to look for something better. But even if no new features are added to D2 for some time, I think it will take something like two more years to have a language+compiler good enough for serious purposes.

Bye,
bearophile

It might be becoming a niche language for smaller to medium-sized projects. But it's being used in a host of big applications, from games to game tools, 3D tools, audio tools, compilers, front ends and back ends to just about everything. I don't think many of these will be ported to a different language (such as D) unless absolutely necessary. For those big projects C++ isn't going anywhere any time soon.

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 6:45 PM, bearophile <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:

> C++ is slowly becoming a niche language, but it's a large niche still, and it's years that people try to look for something better. But even if no new features are added to D2 for some time, I think it will take something like two more years to have a language+compiler good enough for serious purposes.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile
>

"Jeff Nowakowski" <jeff@dilacero.org> wrote in message news:i3ekaf$14hd$1@digitalmars.com...
> On 08/04/2010 09:22 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> Walter is more silent than usual because he's working very hard on the 64-bit compiler. He hopes to have one by the end of this month. His next big goal is shared library support.
>
> While those are both important, isn't it even more important to have the existing 32-bit implementation complete? How can you showcase a language that's incomplete and buggy? Can't both those features wait until after D2 is considered polished enough to be released?
>

Perhaps. But a debate on the ideal priority-ranking could go in circles forever. At the end of the day, something needs to just be picked, worked on, done, and move on, even if it isn't the perfect choice.

> I keep seeing reports from people running into bugs, unfinished features, and incomplete documentation. There's no end in sight, either, yet a book has been released and the language is promoted as if it were a finished product.

Most of those aren't really breakers, though. Even with all of that stuff I'm still far more productive in D than any other language I use. I imagine many other D users feel the same. But lack of 64-bit is a breaker (or near-breaker) for some people, and it's also an obstacle for PR. And the better the PR is, the better chances we have of getting more people coming in and helping out with other aspects, etc.

So there'd be benefits to focusing more on misc bugs, features, documentation, but there's also benefits to focusing on 64-bit. And Walter's gotta at least choose something.

Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> For shared library support on Linux I think http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4583 is a blocker. For Mac OS X a patch is already available (of which the dmd part has already been applied) http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4080 . BTW compiling Tango as a dynamic library on Mac OS X has been possible the last couple of months.

One thing about OS X is that all object files are sharable, so if your code even works on the Mac it will be possible to put it in a shared library. Things are much more complex on Linux.