On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 01:09:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> just added DWARF exception-handling support

I think this illustrates the entire problem. How many years has GCC and LLVM had this?

On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 04:12:20 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> I think this illustrates the entire problem. How many years has GCC and LLVM had this?

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/MSVCCompatibility.html

"Exceptions and SEH: Partial. C++ exceptions (try / catch / throw) and structured exceptions (__try / __except / __finally) mostly work on x64. 32-bit exception handling support is being worked on."


LLVM really isn't in all that different of a place than dmd. They have stuff that works but doesn't have full compatibility with the others yet. Same thing here.

On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 02:22:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 01:09:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Let's see, did I miss a reason?  These are all the ones I've read on the forum in the past.
>
> But the real question is whether it is a strategic good move?

Doesn't matter if it is or it isn't, he has decades invested in it and will not even look at another backend.  Since he's the only one working on it and not that much (with some nips and tucks from Martin, Daniel, Rainer, Kenji, and a few others: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/commits/master/src/backend), I don't see why others are so concerned about it.  A better use of their time would be to chip in themselves, on documentation or whatever else they're capable of contributing.

> Go is the only language now that use its own backend and they loose performance over it, and get bad comments for it, but they get to tailor it to a reasonable GC so it has some strategic value.
>
> Rust recently announced that Mozilla is going to include Rust code in their products in 2016. So they are committed.
>
> The science people seem to rally behind Julia JIT, and a JIT and mindshare is important in that field.
>
> With Swift on Linux the ARC approach becomes less attractive for other languages as you put yourself up for direct comparison. If Swift can get reasonable performance on Linux and Android then they will take a fair marketshare real fast because of tooling and portability, both on mobile and even on web servers.

There is no one language that will work for every market.  With the advent of trends like micro-services, you can even use multiple languages in the same company relatively safely.  D tries to hit a lot of markets, but it cannot possibly hit the sweet spot in every market.  Perhaps those are better tools for those markets, while D will hit different segments of those markets and new markets altogether.

> In this crowded "close to production ready" landscape competition becomes more fierce. I think languages like Swift going cross platform will create trouble for languages like Nim and D.

I agree that Swift is a strong competitor, as I've been saying, but it is currently way behind D in platform support, ie currently just iOS, OS X, and largely done linux/Glibc.  Each has their pros and cons and will garner their own adherents.

On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 02:22:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 01:09:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> [...]
>
> But the real question is whether it is a strategic good move?
>
> Go is the only language now that use its own backend and they loose performance over it, and get bad comments for it, but they get to tailor it to a reasonable GC so it has some strategic value.
>
> Rust recently announced that Mozilla is going to include Rust code in their products in 2016. So they are committed.
>
> The science people seem to rally behind Julia JIT, and a JIT and mindshare is important in that field.
>
> With Swift on Linux the ARC approach becomes less attractive for other languages as you put yourself up for direct comparison. If Swift can get reasonable performance on Linux and Android then they will take a fair marketshare real fast because of tooling and portability, both on mobile and even on web servers.
>
> In this crowded "close to production ready" landscape competition becomes more fierce. I think languages like Swift going cross platform will create trouble for languages like Nim and D.

Just as a side effect of that, see the list of supported languages in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 for editing and basic intelisense.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/11/30/visual-studio-update-1-rtm.aspx

On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 05:20:26 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I don't see why others are so concerned about it.  A better use of their time would be to chip in themselves, on documentation or whatever else they're capable of contributing.
>

I think the primary concern is "what is the plan?". Without a clear plan it really doesn't matter what you do or not do as an individual with just a few hours per week. It's like voting or volunteering for a party with the right ideas, but no clear strategy for getting into position. The second concern is that people evaluate performance based on the official compiler. They evaluate Go, not gccgo, and they evaluate dmd, not ldc with an older frontend. This happens repeatedly when people write about these languages.

> sweet spot in every market.  Perhaps those are better tools for those markets, while D will hit different segments of those markets and new markets altogether.

That required a strategy. Like, I am now likely to pick up C again, just to be able to build tight asm.js. WebGL is now becoming mature and asm.js is becoming a massive target, but it takes a focused group to do better than emscripten... So you need a central strategy in order to organize something like that.

> I agree that Swift is a strong competitor, as I've been saying, but it is currently way behind D in platform support, ie currently just iOS, OS X, and largely done linux/Glibc.  Each has their pros and cons and will garner their own adherents.

Swift may need 1-2 more years, but if people can replace two languages with one, then they have a strong adoption card. But I am not sure if Swift will be able to gain C speeds consitently, though I would not bet on it.

But it is rather obvious that being similar to Swift is not a good strategy. If languages get too close, then the better ecosystem wins.

On Thu, 2015-12-10 at 02:22 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars- d wrote:
> 
[…]
> The science people seem to rally behind Julia JIT, and a JIT and mindshare is important in that field.
> 
[…]

Julia doesn'have that great a penetration in the market compared to Python, R, C++ and Fortran.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Thu, 2015-12-10 at 03:02 +0000, Jonny via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> It would be nice to have a D JIT that is fast as others and can be easily used in a D app and interface with it's host without too much work.
[…]

But D is a fully compiled language with an AOT compiler. How does a JIT fit into the workflow?

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Thursday, 10 December 2015 at 10:51:00 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Julia doesn'have that great a penetration in the market compared to Python, R, C++ and Fortran.

Sure, in day-to-day work people use what they have until they need to start over. How is the landscape going to unfold? What languages would you consider for a from-scratch scientific library? Same thing with Swift, what languages will you consider for cross platform mobile development in a year or two?

Interestingly C++'s position has been strengthened within Google in the last few years, according to Chandler Carruth, so it does not look like Go will driven towards replacing C++? But, it probably has a solid position for smaller scale servers. I personally hope Google will adopt Swift. And I think that would be a better strategy for Google than pushing Go, Dart and so on.

On 2015-12-10 11:52, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> But D is a fully compiled language with an AOT compiler. How does a JIT
> fit into the workflow?

REPL, data/config format, perhaps vibe.d diet templates.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Thu, 2015-12-10 at 13:12 +0100, Jacob Carlborg via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 2015-12-10 11:52, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
> > But D is a fully compiled language with an AOT compiler. How does a
> > JIT
> > fit into the workflow?
> 
> REPL, data/config format, perhaps vibe.d diet templates.

So use of D syntax as a language that isn't actually D?

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder