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OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

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81–90 of 322 posts

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#82
post #63

What's Walther's take on the many gripes with the D leadership?

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him comment here on a D related post. Which I totally understand.

I've definitely seen him discuss D here when it comes up.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#83
post #74
post #20

Are there any examples of forks going in a different direction than the original and being (more) successful?

X.Org. (if you know what X is, you are familiar with X.Org, which is a fork of XFree86) Chromium is a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML. If you use a web browser, that browser is either Firefox or a fork (of a fork) of KHTML. I don't know what percentage of Chromium/Webkit users have heard of KHTML, but I'd recon it's on the order of 1%. mplayer used to be a very popular, very good media player, mostly for linu…

> that browser is either Firefox or a fork (of a fork) of KHTML

Firefox is also a fork of Mozilla (later renamed to Mozilla Suite, itself forked into Seamonkey[0] when Firefox became the main browser the Mozilla Foundation decided to stop developing the Mozilla Suite).

[0] https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#84
My suggestions: completely get rid of GC(use refcounts or borrowed pointers), add macros(see FreeBasic extensions of C macros), migrate everything complex/optional out of stdlib to specific packages(Rust ecosystem is centered on packages not stdlib), and you will have a solid competitor to C++ and perhaps Rust. Rust of course has better macros and type system, but D looks simpler and more approachable for rapid prototyping/tinkering that will drive adoption.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#85
post #9
post #7

D is such a sad case of how a good technical product can fail due to poor leadership and decision making. A language is more than just a compiler, it's also an ecosystem and a community. D's community is actually very welcoming but man, watch some of the DConf videos and Q&As on Youtube and it's cringe seeing key leaders talking down to people, or dismissing people's concerns, or just have this ego about themselves l…

I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++. Rust is sufficiently compelling, with its focus on memory safety.

> I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++.

Not quite. The problem with D is that it was a better C++ than C++98.

In the meantime the C++ world woke up from it's freeze and the standardization process started addressing the requests from the C++ community. Consequently once C++11 was out and work picked up on following standard versions, D ceased to have a selling point.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#86
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is a really frustrating language for me: I understand the safety it provides but find the pain of actually using it makes it uncompelling. Plus, the Rewrite it in Rust movement is very off-putting

Rust is a frustrating language for me too. I never saw the need for it, really. I just stuck with the language constructs in C++ that makes it basically impossible for memory leaks/use after free/use outside of bounds to occur or if they do occur, explode loudly in debug environments. I haven't used new/delete in a personal project in like a decade; longer than Rust has been around. Now I'm working on a project where…

Hell is other people’s code. Of course our code is perfect, and we would never write a buffer overflow or issue that would be solved by memory safety. But I find consistently that other people seem to, and then I’m forced to contribute to the same code base.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#87

My research group left D for Rust several years ago due to nonresponsiveness and poor language development trajectory. While I wish Adam and the others success with OpenD, I hope they can take the opportunity to pick a more unique/memorable name.

LiberateD FreeD

I read TFA, how about screeD?

Too bad it's not focused on a windowing system, they could go with Dfenestration :)

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#88

There's a big thread about this on the D forums: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/beykokfitddfdsjyqjjy@forum.dl...

clarify: the big thread referenced here is started by the people doing the forking (2 people so far), and there's a fair amount of good detailed response by D people which is lacking in TFA above. The orig article is just beefing about personalities, and this link has more technical discussion

sounds from this like the people forking basically want a different language, for which they're willing to make a number of breaking changes.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#89

[flagged]

D has been Open Source since the Gnu and LVM compilers came out, maybe 15 years ago. The dmd backend was converted to full Open Source several years ago. So now all 3 D compilers are fully open source.

Full open source is what allows others to fork it without any licensing issues.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#90
post #7

D is such a sad case of how a good technical product can fail due to poor leadership and decision making. A language is more than just a compiler, it's also an ecosystem and a community. D's community is actually very welcoming but man, watch some of the DConf videos and Q&As on Youtube and it's cringe seeing key leaders talking down to people, or dismissing people's concerns, or just have this ego about themselves l…

If you're put off by key leaders talking down to people, I think you'll want to spend some time in Nim's forum and issue tracker before considering it as an alternative. (YMMV, of course, but I was put off by what I found.)
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