On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its
own thread. It's very important.
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I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies.
Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk
about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the
language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of
reasons:
and it's taken you that long to now that the following are the
problem? (No offense... just seems like the following list is
obvious whether 1 or 1 googol)
* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential
users right off.
Duh! The claim is made that D can work without the GC... but
that's a red herring... If you take about the GC what do you
have? A ton of effort to build something that gets D to work
properly without the GC. It can be done but it isn't done except
by leet guru's who have the time and knowledge to do it. It is
not a built in option that works out of the box.
* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the
competition.
Duh! Every use Visual studio? Sure Visual D offers a glimpse of
hope, but only glimpse. D has some cool stuff but that's all it
is for most users in my guestimation.
* Safety has holes and bugs.
* Hiring people who know D is a problem.
* Documentation and tutorials are weak.
* There's no web services framework (by this time many folks
know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even
heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle
vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum.
There wasn't enough interest.
* (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio
plugin, it doesn't exist.
* Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
* Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the
weaknesses above.
