On Saturday, 29 August 2015 at 14:44:01 UTC, Casual D user wrote:
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.
Seems a bit harsh. As a 'casual D user', you're criticizing Walter for not having dmd inline constructors and destructors at the same time as critizing him for working on codegen. And of course it seems like LDC and GDC do in-line them, so if it matters to you you can use them. Bear in mind that many people seem to be happy enough with languages that are significantly slower than dmd. Of course one will hear disproportionately from people who aren't happy (and fair enough) because if you're happy you let things be. It's not like LDC and GDC are unusable or missing some super critical features just because it takes some time for them to be kept up to date. And if that matters, then a little help for those teams might go a long way as they have a tough job to accomplish with limited resources.
You might also be more rhetorically effective if you acknowledged the very real improvements that have taken place, just in the past year. Sending a rocket isn't always the best way to achieve one's ends.
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2010/12/21/classical-rhetoric-101-the-three-means-of-persuasion/
Even more than this, D has no real IDE integration like C++ or Java
One needs an IDE a bit less than for Java, I suppose. Since there are people working on IDEs and on IDE integration here, some constructive criticism of what you would like to see might again be more helpful rather than just pretending nobody is trying.
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
Strange then that people who don't depend on the GC seem to like D's features anyway. I wonder why that is.
There's other things I can't remember right now.
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.
One needs to pay some attention to critics, because good advice is hard to come by. But it's a mistake to take what they say too seriously, because quite often it's more of an excuse than the real reason. In my experience you can deliver everything people say they want, and then find it isn't that at all. And the lessons of the Innovator's Dilemma by Christensen is that it may be better to develop what one does really well than to focus all one's energy on fixing perceived' weaknesses. It's not like what the crowd says on reddit must be taken as gospel truth, really.
