On Saturday, 2 January 2016 at 00:20:37 UTC, Jason Jeffory wrote:
I think maybe one of the problems with D is that there seems to
be no focused backing of official d libs that are required to
create apps.
e.g., GUI, Audio, Graphics, etc...
If the D community could decide to officially support(with a
distinct web page for such things) such libraries, real
progress might be made.
So much work is done on the compiler itself but most of the
actually things required to make real world use of the compiler
are neglected, It's left up to individuals to do the work and
make all the choices.
But there is a different mentality that happens when it's
"Official". Others are more willing to support, develop, and
use it.
Is this at all possible in the D community?
Making a competitive GUI library is a MASSIVE task. While there
are some usable options available for D currently, I think the
most desirable solution is to make a high quality Qt binding.
Various people have looked into doing so in the past, but I think
they were stalled by D's immature C++ interop. There have been
great strides forward in this area recently, and work is ongoing.
I'd bet a Qt binding will be viable within a year or two, if it's
not already.
As to graphics - it depends on your use case. If you're thinking
of 3D simulations and games, I was under the impression that the
D ecosystem already covers the basics (OpenGL, SDL, SFML) fairly
well.
I'm not sure about audio.
More generally, though - there is a lot of work going into the
compiler and the standard library because they need it quite
badly. With basic issues like safe non-GC memory management yet
unresolved, I don't think it would yet be beneficial to D in the
long run to shift attention away towards other parts of the
ecosystem.
The C++ interop, especially, will do far more to expand the D
ecosystem than the relatively small team working on it could
possibly accomplish by just writing more D libraries.