On Thursday, 28 May 2015 at 14:38:51 UTC, Manu wrote:
I expect I'm not alone. Please share the absolute blockers
preventing
you from adopting D in your offices. I wonder if there will be
common
themes emerge?
In general, I'd say that the problems are mostly cultural or
political. Even if D can do everything that we need, there's no
way that we're moving a large existing codebase to it (the code
is flaky enough as it is), and even if writing new pieces in D
would technically work well, it would be adding yet another
language to the mix for folks to learn. And most of the folks
that I've worked with really don't care about learning new
languages, or if they do, just plain getting the work done with
what they currently have is already a big enough concern that
they're not going to be in hurry to learn a new one. I'm more
likely to get labeled as eccentric than to get folks to actually
want to use D at work if I pushed it. I get labeled that way
enough just from talking about it. And considering that we
haven't even found the time yet to switch our codebase to 64-bit,
I don't think that doing much with D is really on the table at
this point.
The only technical barriers that I can think of at the moment
that I might run into if I were to actually switch would relate
to C/C++ interoperability and shared libraries, and AFAIK, those
are currently good enough.
- Jonathan M Davis
