Comment by destructionator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by destructionator | Hacker News Reader

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destructionator

I have no confidence left in the leadership of old D. This is an example: porting druntime to emscripten wasn't actually that hard to do, I did it in about a week of spare time in between kid and day job. Their solution, in so much as they pay attention to it at all, is to just point at betterC which remains half-assed for about a decade now (search my blog archives, here's one with them talking about "A betterC standard library" from December 2016 - https://arsdnet.net/this-week-in-d/2016-dec-18.html - and none of that has materialized ).

You might say if it is so easy, why not do it upstream? It takes years of political arguments and random ghosting to get anything done up there, all while constant (regression inducing) code churn breaks your PRs every other month, so you spend 3x the time rebasing than you ever spent writing the implementation before it is merged...... if it ever gets merged at all. I have several successful contributions to upstream D, it happens, but most the work done there is ignored. You might get some encouraging forum replies, but when it comes time to ship it? Crickets. Several former D contributors jumped ship for Zig many years ago, and it was a real loss for us (and real gain for them).

With the opend, I know if it works and delivers real world value, I can ship a release, dmd and ldc together, so minimal duplicated waste work.

What should you use? idk, opend is basically my pet project, provided in the hope that it will be useful, but THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED `'AS IS″ AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE so your mileage may vary. Still, I maintain about a half million lines of code, some of which is quite old, so keeping some stability is important to me while moving forward with select common-sense, incremental improvements. Most D code works fine either way though, I've done web programming a long time, in the old school tradition, so words like "progressive enhancement" and "graceful degradation" are meaningful to me, even when being a compiler maintainer.

> point at betterC which remains half-assed for about a decade now (search my blog archives, here's one with them talking about "A betterC standard library" from December 2016 - https://arsdnet.net/this-week-in-d/2016-dec-18.html - and none of that has materialized ).

Oof, yeah that is definitely a pain point. Not to get too personal, but why would you continue to invest so much time in the language if upstream isn't accommodating?

Has WalterBright had any comments on this? He usually is so vocal, any hope of a remerge of the OpenD changes in to CanonD?

Anyway, I appreciate you trying to advance Dlang, I fight for it all the time at work, and usually get to do stuff in it(I am old and have privileges).

> Not to get too personal, but why would you continue to invest so much time in the language if upstream isn't accommodating?

Sunk cost fallacy lol. I got on the D train back in 2006 and of those half million lines of code I'm responsible for maintaining, about a quarter million are my own. A lot of work to make that... I have my own, from scratch: gui toolkit, terminal emulator, games, spreadsheet, web apps, shell, scriptable calculator, and more. Mostly mine but using libraries or ported third party code sometimes: music players, web browsers (one is from scratch but not terribly functional, one using chromimum libraries I'm typing this comment on right now), window manager, taskbar, the list goes on.

My whole daily work environment is made out of D code. And yeah, sure, there's alternatives, but I like mine. And a lot of it is making the apis cute. For example, I wanted to add a menu option to reset something in one of my programs last week. So I opened the code and wrote

``` @menu("&Query") @accelerator("Ctrl+R") void Load_Default() { query.content = readTextFile("default.txt"); variables.content = "{}"; } ```

It recompiled in about a second and a half and just like that, I can press ctrl+r to reload the defaults, or click Query -> Load Default in the menu (or alt+q and keyboard to it etc). My gui library takes care of a lot of things so I just write some functionality as-needed and use it a few seconds later.

Can I do that with Microsoft Excel? excel is a useful program too, but it takes longer to just load than it takes me to change the code, recompile, and relaunch my spreadsheet program lol.

Could I port all this stuff to other languages? Maybe. But it is less work to just maintain a stable fork of the compiler lol. (at the risk of getting flagged for being a troll again, I feel the same way about wayland... easier to maintain xorg, a program i haven't even restarted for years, than to rewrite the whole ecosystem.)

And that's the key point too, I do generally think the D language is mostly good enough as-is, so if I never committed another line of code to it, I'd still find it good enough. But it is nice if I do hit a language/compiler problem I can just fix it too.

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