On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 10:25:57 +0000, Joakim wrote:
> Why hasn't ruby/rails, Rust, or Nim gotten backing from big players yet?

Mozilla's 2016 revenue was half a billion dollars. I would certainly hope that's big enough ot count as a big player.

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 15:48:13 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 10:25:57 +0000, Joakim wrote:
>> Why hasn't ruby/rails, Rust, or Nim gotten backing from big players yet?
>
> Mozilla's 2016 revenue was half a billion dollars. I would certainly hope that's big enough ot count as a big player.

Sociomantic was over $100 million in revenue in 2013 before they got bought, according to this 2014 press release:

"Sociomantic Labs GmbH... employs more than 200 professionals in 16 offices worldwide with over $100 million in revenue in 2013"
https://www.dunnhumby.com/dunnhumby-acquires-sociomantic-revolutionise-digital-advertising

So do we already have a big player backing D? ;) Of course, both are tiny compared to google or Apple, who're backing Go and Swift.

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 15:57:27 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> "Sociomantic Labs GmbH... employs more than 200 professionals in 16 offices worldwide with over $100 million in revenue in 2013"
> https://www.dunnhumby.com/dunnhumby-acquires-sociomantic-revolutionise-digital-advertising
>
> So do we already have a big player backing D? ;)

And, isn't Symmetry Investments even bigger?

On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 15:57:27 +0000, Joakim wrote:
> On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 15:48:13 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 10:25:57 +0000, Joakim wrote:
>>> Why hasn't ruby/rails, Rust, or Nim gotten backing from big players yet?
>>
>> Mozilla's 2016 revenue was half a billion dollars. I would certainly hope that's big enough ot count as a big player.
> 
> Sociomantic was over $100 million in revenue in 2013 before they got bought, according to this 2014 press release:
> 
> "Sociomantic Labs GmbH... employs more than 200 professionals in 16 offices worldwide with over $100 million in revenue in 2013" https://www.dunnhumby.com/dunnhumby-acquires-sociomantic-revolutionise-
digital-advertising
> 
> So do we already have a big player backing D? ;) Of course, both are tiny compared to google or Apple, who're backing Go and Swift.

Sociomantic is an ad company making 0.5% as much as Google, which is an ad company plus a lot of other things that suggest a much broader developer focus. If Sociomantic does spend as much proportionately on developer / community stuff as Google, we should expect 0.5% as much benefit.

Mozilla is a company that serves developers as a huge portion of its purpose. So while it's got about 2% of the revenue of Google, it spends a lot more proportionately on developer-oriented stuff.

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 17:16:42 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 15:57:27 +0000, Joakim wrote:
>> On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 15:48:13 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
>>> On Fri, 23 Nov 2018 10:25:57 +0000, Joakim wrote:
>>>> Why hasn't ruby/rails, Rust, or Nim gotten backing from big players yet?
>>>
>>> Mozilla's 2016 revenue was half a billion dollars. I would certainly hope that's big enough ot count as a big player.
>> 
>> Sociomantic was over $100 million in revenue in 2013 before they got bought, according to this 2014 press release:
>> 
>> "Sociomantic Labs GmbH... employs more than 200 professionals in 16 offices worldwide with over $100 million in revenue in 2013" https://www.dunnhumby.com/dunnhumby-acquires-sociomantic-revolutionise-
> digital-advertising
>> 
>> So do we already have a big player backing D? ;) Of course, both are tiny compared to google or Apple, who're backing Go and Swift.
>
> Sociomantic is an ad company making 0.5% as much as Google, which is an ad company plus a lot of other things that suggest a much broader developer focus. If Sociomantic does spend as much proportionately on developer / community stuff as Google, we should expect 0.5% as much benefit.
>
> Mozilla is a company that serves developers as a huge portion of its purpose. So while it's got about 2% of the revenue of Google, it spends a lot more proportionately on developer-oriented stuff.

That makes no sense: all three are primarily geared towards their customers, ie advertisers who want to sell stuff to you.

But of the three, google is the one that serves devs the most as a proportion of their business, not Mozilla, with their development platforms and SDKs like Android, Google Cloud, Google Assistant, etc.

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 10:25:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 14:38:07 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 21 November 2018 at 13:26:34 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>
> [...]
> Why hasn't ruby/rails, Rust, or Nim gotten backing from big players yet? Most things don't get backing from big players, especially initially. What you hope is to create a superior tool that helps small companies grow into the big players someday.
> [...]

They have, unless you aren't paying attention to the news it seems.

Sun invested into JRuby and Netbeans support, while they dropped support for
Netbeans, under Oracle's stewardship, they kept investing into JRuby. In fact JRuby is what drives most of the Graal optimizations regarding compilation of dynamic languages and was the genesis of Project Panama, JNI's replacement project.

Besides being sponsored by Mozilla, Rust is now used in Visual Studio Code, IoT Core native layer and an internal distributed service by Microsoft. There are also ongoing projects from Oracle and Dropbox.

Khronos is working together with Mozilla on a multi-platform 3D API framework, which is built with Rust.

Four game studios, namely Ready at Dawn, Chucklefish, SEED and Embark(former DICE/EA devs) have announced that they are building their future tooling and engine improvement with Rust.

Rust was given the spotlight alongside C and C++ at Chrome Developers Summit 2018 regarding the languages currently mature for WebAssembly development.

GNOME is adopting Rust and collaborating with Mozilla to improve the overall development experience when dealing with the gobject OOP model.

Nim just got some support from Status, one of the companies behind Ethereum, but I guess it isn't a major player.

So there is some support going on from them.

--
Paulo

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 19:51:23 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 10:25:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> [...]
>
> They have, unless you aren't paying attention to the news it seems.
>
> [...]

Quod erat demonstrandum. Obrigado.

On 11/23/2018 4:59 AM, Chris wrote:
> Then there was the whole issue of string handling and autodecode and the way the leadership / big guys in the community dealt with it. I was of the opinion that such an essential issue had to be fixed immediately (of course with a proper path to fix it). I even offered to be the guinea pig and document the transition. But no.
> 
> Then there were the dreaded dmd updates. "Shit, what will break now?" this question would be my constant companion.
Fixing autodecode will break about everything. But you don't like breaking changes.

What do you suggest?

On 11/23/2018 4:59 AM, Chris wrote:
> Then there was the whole issue of ARM. Walter said he had no experience with it and kinda didn't care either,
Actually, a person in the D community was working for a couple years on an ARM back end, but he eventually lost interest and it was abandoned.

Building a backend is something usually teams of people work on exclusively. It's a little unfair to expect me to do one spending an hour or so a day on it. I can't order someone to work on it, I can't hire someone to work on it.

It had to wait until someone both competent and self-motivated stepped up to do it.

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 03:56:31PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 11/23/2018 4:59 AM, Chris wrote:
> > Then there was the whole issue of ARM. Walter said he had no experience with it and kinda didn't care either,
>
> Actually, a person in the D community was working for a couple years on an ARM back end, but he eventually lost interest and it was abandoned.

LDC is already well able to target ARM -- I've been using it to write Android apps, and while it takes a bit of work to set up, once it's setup it works very well.

Frankly, I would not be particularly interested in an ARM target for dmd: dmd's weak optimizer, sorry to say, makes it a rather unattractive option compared to LDC.  And now that LDC is keeping up with DMD releases, I'm quite tempted to just start using LDC for all of my D projects, or at least all the performance-sensitive ones, since it would be keeping up with the latest features / bugfixes.


> Building a backend is something usually teams of people work on exclusively.  It's a little unfair to expect me to do one spending an hour or so a day on it. I can't order someone to work on it, I can't hire someone to work on it.
> 
> It had to wait until someone both competent and self-motivated stepped up to do it.

I would much rather Walter spend his time on higher-level, more important D issues than writing another dmd backend.  Though I wouldn't mind if he gave a bit more love to the dmd optimizer. ;-)  (When will we get loop unrolling?)


T

-- 
Obviously, some things aren't very obvious.