On Friday, 28 August 2015 at 21:59:57 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/28/2015 4:18 AM, Temtaime wrote:
Are you sure that ONE Walter can achieve what they done ?
People told me I couldn't write a C compiler, then told me I
couldn't write a C++ compiler. I'm still the only person who
has ever implemented a complete C++ compiler (C++98). Then they
all (100%) laughed at me for starting D, saying nobody would
ever use it.
My whole career is built on stepping over people who told me I
couldn't do anything and wouldn't amount to anything.
LLVM is a fine compiler, but there's nothing magical about it.
Besides, we have a secret productivity enhancing weapon that
LLVM doesn't have - D!
Now, if I can only tear myself away from the internet for a
while...
The problem is that you're pretty much the face of D along with
Andrei. Andrei announcing he was quitting Facebook to work on D
fulltime was one of the most popular articles on Reddit's
programming subreddit in the past month.
Someone picks up D, and realizes that out of the box it has a
full stop the world 1960s-style garbage collector completely
wrapped in a mutex, can't inline constructors/destructors,
basically non-functioning RTTI, no safe way to manage resources,
a type system with massive holes in it, type qualifiers being
suggestions, the non-proprietary compilers that generate faster
code lag a year+ behind. Even more than this, D has no real IDE
integration like C++ or Java, and none is even being worked on as
far as I'm aware. D is advertised as a system's language, but
most of the built-in language features require the GC so you
might as well just use C if you can't use the GC. There's other
things I can't remember right now.
Then they come to the forums and see the head people of D working
on ... DMD codegen improvements. That inspires a lot of
confidence that these issues will get fixed beyond fixing them
yourself - because that's what everyone adopting a new language
wants to do.
Do you know what the most complaints about D in the reddit thread
were? D's incredibly old garbage collector, a complete lack of a
good IDE, and a lack of good manual memory management utilities.
I'm not blaming you, I'm just not sure if you're aware of what
this looks like. If you intend for D to be a hobby project, then
continue on.
