On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 9:37 PM, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com>wrote:

>
> Me: compiler
> Sean: druntime
> Brad Roberts: bugzilla, mailing lists, D test suite
> Brad Anderson: D source code repository
> Jan Knepper: site hosting
> Several people: Phobos (generally under Andrei's leadership)
> Helmut Leitner: D wiki
> Andrei: build master (coming soon!)
>
> Of course, LDC, GDC, Tango, Dil, and all the other libraries and tools, etc., are all led by their various self-selected groups, not me.
>

Who is working on the D spec documentation, if anyone? I know Andrei and others work on the Phobos docs, but what about the D docs?

On Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:23:25 +0000, BCS wrote:

> For a number of IP/legal reasons, Walter CAN'T work on LLVM or LDC.

Hi,

can you please elaborate a bit?
I remember that statement has appeared before,
but I can't remember the reason that was given.

On 8/4/2010 9:22 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.

Awesome!  Go Walter!

On Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:19:02 -0400, Adam Ruppe wrote:

> On 8/4/10, bearophile <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:
>> I am sorry to say this, but I think porting the current back-end to 64 bit is a waste of time because it will not be used for professional usages. I think LLVM will be the main back-end for professional usages of D2
> 
> Get back to me when LDC starts to actually /work/. It is *completely unusable* in its current state and its developers don't seem to care.
> 
> I don't understand what you see in it.

LDC for llvm 2.7 doesn't have debug support because the LDC debug info code only works for llvm 2.6. I assume that's what you call unusable? There are bugs as well, sure. But nothing too serious from what I know about.

LDC is developed on a personal by need/interest basis.
Atm. the original developers don't have time or much interest in LDC.
It's a volunteer effort from the beginning and everyone is invited to
work on ldc.

mwarning wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:23:25 +0000, BCS wrote:
> 
>> For a number of IP/legal reasons, Walter CAN'T work on LLVM or LDC.
> can you please elaborate a bit?
> I remember that statement has appeared before,
> but I can't remember the reason that was given.

Because when I've had the roomful of lawyers do their due diligence on me, saying "I never looked at the source code" is an effective defense against any claims of possible infringement. When I say that, they click their briefcases shut, say "we're done here", and leave.

On 2010-08-05 21:37, Walter Bright wrote:
> retard wrote:
>> I understood that all the contributors are waiting for the decision of
>> a single person.
>
> Not true, that only applies to the compiler. Phobos is managed by
> several people who have commit privileges.
>
>> Walter needs to review all compiler patches,
>
> Yes, because I need to keep a handle on exactly how the compiler works.
> If I lose track of it, it can become a mess of things like "this seems
> to work" with little understanding. I want to especially thank Don
> Clugston for his invaluable help in reviewing submitted compiler
> patches, testing them, fixing a lot of the hard problems, and making it
> easy for me.
>
>
>> he needs to review all patches to the spec, he needs to defend D on
>> reddit, newsgroups, and all other forums.
>
> More like I want to. Anyone else is welcome to help out here. I am
> hardly in a position to stop anyone from helping there <g>.
>
>> He handles the whole release process.
>
> That actually is about to change.
>
>> He doesn't tell anything about future directions so nobody knows about
>> them.
>
> What's unclear about it?

Basically there's no road map, especially no official. What will happen in one month? Two months? Half a year? The only way to get some idea about what will happen is following the newsgroups and even doing that you don't know what actually will end up in the compiler. You also have to follow the commits to the repository and then it's already too late, it has already happened.

>> The management model doesn't scale when you get more and more
>> contributors. At some point Walter won't have enough time to review
>> all contributions even if it didn't do anything else.
>
> You're right, I can't review them all. In particular, I am fairly
> uninvolved in the development of Phobos, other than popping up now and
> then to complain about something :-)
>
>> For example now that he is focusing on 64-bit support, all discussion
>> about rewriting the spec, fixing bugs, improving the other parts of
>> the toolchain, or developing the language further (D 2.1 or 3.0) has
>> stalled.
>
> This is nonsense, as I'm not stopping anyone from helping out with any
> of that. In fact, tomorrow I have a lunch date with a fellow who is
> working on a D debugger.
>
> As another example of many who have stepped up with invaluable help,
> Shin Fujishiro did the pioneering work to get D2 working on FreeBSD.
>
>> Many people have asked bearophile to stop discussing new language
>> features because it takes away too much valuable time from Walter.
>> Something is wrong here.
>
> I haven't asked bearophile or anyone else to stop discussing new
> language features. Anyone is free on this n.g. to ask whatever they want
> of others, and everyone is free to accede to or ignore those requests.
>
> Here's an incomplete list of people who are in charge of various aspects
> of D:
>
> Me: compiler
> Sean: druntime
> Brad Roberts: bugzilla, mailing lists, D test suite
> Brad Anderson: D source code repository
> Jan Knepper: site hosting
> Several people: Phobos (generally under Andrei's leadership)
> Helmut Leitner: D wiki
> Andrei: build master (coming soon!)
>
> Of course, LDC, GDC, Tango, Dil, and all the other libraries and tools,
> etc., are all led by their various self-selected groups, not me.


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> Who is working on the D spec documentation, if anyone? I know Andrei and others work on the Phobos docs, but what about the D docs?

The D docs are actually part of the Phobos under source control, and the people who work on the library have commit privileges for it. Although nobody has checked in any changes to it other than the changelog and some minor formatting stuff.

On 8/5/10, mwarning <moritzwarning@web.de> wrote:
>  I assume that's what you call unusable?

I mean unusable in the literal sense:
$ ./ldc
./ldc: error while loading shared libraries: libelf.so.0: cannot open
shared object file: No such file or directory

I hear it also doesn't do D2 at all, which is unacceptable, and that it doesn't do exceptions in Windows - thus meaning it doesn't work there at all for any real programs - which is unacceptable AND unforgivable. AFAIK, the Windows unusability is in LLVM itself.

Honestly, I'd be surprised if there's a single person on the planet who uses a D LLVM compiler professionally today given its limitations. LDC is garbage, and that's all that actually exists. To abandon DMD for that is language suicide.

On 2010-08-05 19:42, Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

I was not saying it's going to be easy to make shared libraries work on Linux. I've tried to make shared libraries working on Linux starting with the same approach I used when making them work on Mac OS X. Issue 4583 is how far I got, then I couldn't get further. I'm just pointing out that fixing issue 4583 is where one could start to make shared libraries work on Linux.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> What's unclear about it?
> 
> Basically there's no road map, especially no official. What will happen in one month? Two months? Half a year? The only way to get some idea about what will happen is following the newsgroups and even doing that you don't know what actually will end up in the compiler. You also have to follow the commits to the repository and then it's already too late, it has already happened.

The roadmap is 64 bit Linux, followed by shared library support under Linux. Concurrently and for the near future, the concentration will be on toolchain and usability issues, not new language features.

64 bits on other platforms will follow once it proves out on Linux.