Hi all. I came across this article on Hacker News: https://www.yet-another-blog.com/porting_the_game_to_jai_part0/

I’m interested in reading your thoughts on the ‘Why not D’ section. Anyone have experiences that match the specific points there? I haven’t experienced them but I also don’t debug on Windows. I also find D’s documentation to be excellent.

I’m super-positive on D but also interested in whether there are others with the same issues as the article’s author.

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 17:20:54 UTC, Kyle Ingraham wrote:

I have with regards to debugging on windows. It is unironically so terrible that I have to stop using the d programming language all together. The difficulty in fixing requires too much time from me and it a requires a full time developer just to fix this. I can't recommend programming d on windows platform for serious work, due to this major issue.

• Alex

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 17:20:54 UTC, Kyle Ingraham wrote:

About the compilation speed, I think the author does not yet realize that you have to think about performance of compile-time execution, similarly as with runtime execution. The algorithm used matters a lot, also at compile time. Spending 60sec on that small of a codebase is not my experience (*), so I think it's just a piece of compile-time code that is consuming most of the time (note that his optimized build only takes 2x longer).

-Johan

(*) >10 times larger linecount project with lots of compile-time stuff and template complexity, 1.8GB main executable binary in debug mode, about ten 100MB executables, just tested: builds in 300seconds. Just semantic analysis (compile without machine codegen) takes 130seconds.

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 17:20:54 UTC, Kyle Ingraham wrote:

Some valid criticisms, specially regarding to debugging, it has improved so there is that

This one i agree too, it's nice when the language allows you to be expressive without being noisy

The Enum Type Inference DIP is a move in the right direction imo

I also like that idea, i wonder if dub could support something like it, at the end of the day, dub just parse a json into a struct

// build.d

import dub;

void build(Builder* builder)
{
    builder.target_type = .exe;
    builder.target_name = "game";

    auto config = builder.create_configuration("config_a");
    config.(..)

    config.prebuild_commands ~= () {
        // do stuff
    };
}

And then dub could just run that function directly instead of parsing a json

This one i find suspicious and very surprising

My 30+k LOC game rebuilds fully in just 1.2 sec, i don't touch phobos and i'm light on templates

On picks D because it's fast at compilation, so by the time it reaches 60s i wonder why he didn't think there is a problem somewhere before... like at 2-5 seconds it already is slow, at that time you need to guess that the code you wrote is cat piss and it is time to reflect on what you are doing..

I suggest that autho to stick to D for fast iteration and to ping the forum whenever there is a bug that's blocking you...

That's why it's important to be pro active, most users won't complain about issues, they'll just move on..

Programming languages should:

• be easy to debug out of the box
• be easy to write/read without being verbose
• be fast at compilation
• be fast at runtime

Once my game will be at a visually pleasant state, i'll write a proper blog post, i'll prove these people wrong

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 21:17:42 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:

Damn, typos..

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 21:20:17 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:

He wrote that DMD is not acceptable for him, that the debug info in DMD is just wrong somehow.. “DMD has historically had a lot of issues with the quality of its debug info”
I think that's why the proposal: for development iteration use DMD, for production LDC is not suitable for his code and his case.

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 17:20:54 UTC, Kyle Ingraham wrote:

I'm using VisualD and yeah it has become a bit strange over time, with debugging values being shown wrong, it also depends what's your compiler and whether youa re using Mago or isual studio debugger, breakpoints sometimes not triggering unless you rebuild... I'm pretty sure it used to be a bit better.

... but the last thing I would do is rewrite a whole codebase just for such a reason. It's not even clear Jai has a Visual Studio extension at all.

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 17:20:54 UTC, Kyle Ingraham wrote:

Just a quick question about Jai, can anybody obtain the Jai compiler today?

On Wednesday, 23 November 2022 at 22:29:24 UTC, IGotD- wrote:

It looks like it’s accessible through a closed beta: https://github.com/Jai-Community/Jai-Community-Library/wiki/Overview#history