On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 20:02:27 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 16:17:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
you can optimize for one niche and do extremely well there,
but then you often find yourself stuck in that niche, as Go
finds itself today.
Being stuck in Go's niche would be a fantastic situation for D
as Go's market penetration might be 20x that of D. The main
limitation for Go is the Go language authors' vision and
attitudes. Not really related to the domain.
If it were merely the D team's goal to quickly gain usage like
Go, such higher market penetration would be fantastic, but I
don't think that's what they're after. It seems to be unseating
C/C++ as the major systems and application programming languages,
while simultaneously expanding that market upwards into
higher-level domains C++ can't get into today.
That's a longer game, one you don't rush into. Will D get there?
I have no idea, but the recent improvements in C++ imply that new
AoT-compiled languages like D, Rust, and Go are at least
pressuring C++ to up its game. In that sense, the new languages
can't lose, because even if they go out of use, their best
features will already have made it into C++.
But I don't think they have to worry about that, as I suspect the
market for AoT-compiled languages is simply becoming more
fragmented again, as the scripting languages market has long
been. Each of these AoT languages will likely maintain their own
niche, and C++ has so much legacy baggage- they never talk about
getting rid of the preprocessor, that's when I'll know they're
serious- that at least one of them will displace it at the top,
maybe D. :)
