On Wednesday, 22 July 2015 at 21:38:14 UTC, Joakim wrote:
The finance guys seem to be coming on board, the Dconf '15 talk
by the fund guy, Smith, probably helps. I thought this was a
nice endorsement recently, a reddit comment by a high-frequency
trader which ended with:
"[W]e've loved D so much that we're in the middle of a full
rewrite from C++11 to D. The productivity boost is absolutely
worth it."
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3cg1r0/lessons_learned_writing_a_filesystem_in_d/csvyxn8
But it doesn't say why. Did they evaluate Rust too?
Granted, everyone can find several very good reasons to dislike
C++, so any reasonable language that can replace it can be said
to have an advantage if that dislike is present on a C++ team...
But as far as C/C++ replacement languages go, there are several
focusing on being more suitable than C++ for specific niches:
Rust, Go, Chapel, Vala…
The more generic ones like D, Loci, etc appears to be less used.
I assume the lack of a specific edge over C++ matters.
And as I've said before, focusing on a domain means you
optimize for it, which inevitably means you become less general.
Not really, you just focus your effort at making it work really
well for a particular domain. Like C++ with extensions for a
specific purpose.
Php has proven to be highly optimized for the web programming
domain, in that it is highly successful at being chosen for
many web projects, but almost nobody would want to use it for
anything else, for a variety of reasons, but mainly that the
qualities that make it successful on the web hurt it in other
domains.
Well, Php is quite horrible for web programming too, but they
gained traction for many of the same reasons perl did:
- It was easy to get started with when you needed 10-50 lines of
scripting in 500 lines of HTML.
- Provided library interfaces that was similar to
Unix/C-libraries (really awful, but easy to get started)
- Early adopters, there was no real competition outside perl
- It got "bundled" with web-servers one way or the other.
languages. Even if the pendulum doesn't swing all the way back
as far as we think it will for general-purpose native
languages, that's a very large niche, one with few choices- C,
C++, D, Rust, Go (the first two legacy)- and well worth
competing in.
But I think Rust and Go are focusing on specific domains. I think
people pick languages now looking for specific characteristics
that match their domain. I think the overlap between Rust and Go
is rather small.
roaring past D. If your only point is that it's done better
than it has a right to because it has a very specific strength,
I'd say that Erlang captured a market despite shortcoming because
it was the only easy-way-out. And you probably could say that
about PhP too.
