• bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> Oct 08 2008
• Leandro Lucarella <llucax gmail.com> Oct 09 2008

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Andrei Alexandrescu:
 Ok, per Aarti's suggestion: without speaking officially for Walter, let 
 me ask this - what do you think are the top issues you'd like to see 
 fixed in D?


I'll give only one answer instead of five.

The single most important issue isn't about D itself, like silly details like
replacing "invariant" with "immutable", but in its development process. Once
you have fixed that, all or most issues with D will be eventually fixed, or
they will have a chance to be eventually fixed.

I am not a fanatic of the Open Source philosophy, I use proprietary programs
too, and I often like them, I generally don't use Linux. But the single biggest
problem with D is that it's partially closed source still, or it smells like
that. GDC doesn't change this fact much.

Tango is better than Phobos not because its string functions are faster, but
because a community of people is working on it. It's not perfect, but I am sure
lot of problems will be fixed, and it will improve. Tango is an example of open
source project, and it's healthy. The DMD compiler and the development of the D
language are wrong, because they aren't community-driven, people aren't fixing
many bugs. Most bug fixes come from a single person. If you look at Python you
can see a healthy development process, even when the only developers where
Guido and one friend of him.

Until the development process of D doesn't become more open souce, like Tango,
D will not solve its main problem.

There's a risk, of course, that making D community-driven will make it try to
go in a thousand different directions at the same time. Well, I think that risk
may be avoided in some ways, and I think it may lead to less problems than the
current ones anyway.

Bye,
bearophile

Leandro Lucarella <llucax gmail.com> writes:

bearophile, el  8 de octubre a las 18:50 me escribiste:
 Tango is better than Phobos not because its string functions are faster,
 but because a community of people is working on it. It's not perfect,
 but I am sure lot of problems will be fixed, and it will improve. Tango
 is an example of open source project, and it's healthy. The DMD compiler
 and the development of the D language are wrong, because they aren't
 community-driven, people aren't fixing many bugs. Most bug fixes come
 from a single person. If you look at Python you can see a healthy
 development process, even when the only developers where Guido and one
 friend of him.
 
 Until the development process of D doesn't become more open souce, like
 Tango, D will not solve its main problem.


Completely agree. I was about to say this but I read the complete thread
in case somebody else mention it. Thanks for doing it.

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (luca) | Blog colectivo: http://www.mazziblog.com.ar/blog/
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