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:
* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right
off.
* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.
* 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.
A note to all on the GC. We have a GSoC project this year for the GC. He
is currently working on improving the GC code to allow for multiple GC
implementations and bringing in Rainer's Precise GC on-board. Once he
has completed the on-boarding he will work on improving the precision of
the precise GC.
A precise GC is important as it paves the way for
background/generational/concurrent GC algorithms, such as what you find
in modern .NET/Java apps. I feel that this will go a *long* towards
solving the majority of the complaints about the GC, with the exception
of the "never-GC" crowd.
--
// Adam Wilson
// import quiet.dlang.dev;
