• dolive <dolive89 sina.com> Mar 24 2010

dolive <dolive89 sina.com> writes:

Ary Borenszweig дµ½:

 Descent has a problem: it supports D1 very well (kinda) but good D2 
 support is still far away.  The latest dmd versions I ported it to are 
 1.045 and 2.030. Porting from 1.045 to 1.050 should be fast (not many 
 front-end changes). Porting from 2.030 to 2.035 is heavy because a lot 
 of changes were introduced.
 
 In both cases porting is a slow (and boring) task: checking the diffs 
 between each file, finding the matching function if it already exists or 
 creating it, copying the code, translating it to Java, then translating 
 some bits of code to Descent (it's a bit more than just copy, past, 
 change size_t to int, remove stars). Doing it alone is really, really 
 slow and boring, but I have no problem doing it from time to time, like 
 maybe 10, 15 minutes each day.
 
 Another problem with porting, specially to D2, is that when I'll finish 
 porting to 2.035 there will probably be a 2.037. Maybe some changes that 
 were applied in 2.035 were roll backed or changed a little, so perhaps I 
 should wait for D2 to become frozen and then port. Either way, I'm 
 afraid that when I'll finally have good D2 support there will be a D3 in 
 the way. When I stabilize Descent more or less (write a lot of tests, 
 improve memory and performance, etc.) maybe the situation that exists 
 now will repeat itself: D2 will be more or less stable but some people 
 will be focused on D3 because it's the new thing, Descent won't support 
 D3 because it's a moving target and because it's not backward compatible 
 with D2, so I'll start porting to D3 but D4 will appear, etc.
 
 And I think this situation doesn't only affect Descent but many 
 libraries and tool suffer from this constant upgrades in D. I think this 
 situation sucks. :-P
 
 Finally, D's userbase is not huge so I really can't tell if Descent is 
 useful enough (and there are the people that prefer to code without an 
 IDE, or with a lighter one).
 
 So... what should I do?
 
 For now I decided to wait, and even maybe abandon the whole idea of 
 keeping Descent up-to-date until D becomes more successful (more 
 probability of people helping me).



please update to dmd2.042 , thanks you every much !

dolive