On Monday, 13 July 2015 at 07:11:35 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Sunday, 12 July 2015 at 19:02:23 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
I'd consider D a failure if it couldn't fill both of these
roles. D is a general purpose systems programming language. It
doesn't and shouldn't care about what you are using it for.
There is plenty of overlap in what you need for high
performance web backends and high performance gamedev.
Here's the deal: there is no such thing as a general purpose
(system) language in the empirical sense. We might have been
lead to believe that C or C++ were general purpose, but that
only happend because there were no visible viable alternatives.
C is more and more becoming a kernel/embedded language, C++ is
more and more becoming a legacy/niche language. C++ is only a
game dev language after you add various extensions (e.g. simd).
It is only a number-crunching language after you add some other
extensions. So you need a direction in the feature set towards
an application area.
When you get new languages that cut down on development time
(like Rust and Go) the C/C++ application domain will leak over
to those niches based on the desired feature set. But the
feature set needs to be complete for that application area
(e.g. GC with the right characteristics, inlining/simd, GPU
programming etc).
D needs to complete the feature set for some sizeable domain in
order to compete in this emerging market of "many languages"
(thanks to LLVM).
Not long ago, C++ was the perfect programming language that
everybody was running to. Then came ~ Java, ....
What I am saying is people do not know what they want at times.
They get up everyday and they have a new idea on what D should
be. Follow such comments and you will make some bad decisions.
Currently, we are in a world where p. languages are driven by the
demands of today.
Who knew that JavaScipt will become the language for the web? But
the demand of the past shifted to the web and now the worst p.
language rules the web (Sorry if you love JS too much but there
is too much bugs). Now we are stuck in it, who knows until when
before the world rushes to a new domain.
Now back to D:
The absence of certain tools and frameworks does not mean D is
not picking up (not catching interests). The language is still
maturing, and I see it maturing like gold. When D grows up (even
though it is doing powerful things in its infancy), you and I
will appreciate that it did not rush into any domain. With
extensions, D can fit in any domain and this obviously takes time.
I am so tired(:>;) of seeing them (rust, Go, Pony, Cat, ..)
everywhere, if one thinks rust rust OR JavaScript is the language
they are planing to use for your next record-breaking kernel,
..... Because D cannot be them all.
The comparison war a bad chakra ....
