On Saturday, 7 October 2017 at 05:19:21 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
I saw we ditch the lot and focus on the large languages where D can get some traction (C#/Java).
I don't see a chance to attack C# unless Microsoft officially adopts D.
Java is facing some uncertainty at the moment. The Java 9 module feature (Jigsaw) was forced against community/committee consensus. Oracle seems to let go (See EE4J). Java people are fine with GC, but really care for their IDE and D is lacking there.
With respect to GC, I consider performance a red herring. Everybody who really cares for performance has enough possibilities in D to achieve it. My short answer wrt D and GC is "It is not really an issue" which admittedly does not sound very convincing. There is a long answer which is basically the article series in the D blog and I believe it is convincing enough. People looking for a short convincing answer are just chasing some hype, ignore them.
I see opportunities for D in the web backend world. Microservices and serverless architectures make it (relatively) easy to introduce new languages. D needs more framework stuff for "easy and quick" microservices. D needs better IDE support, for example in hipster editors like VSCode.
I see opportunities for D in the embedded world. The people who try to use Java for embedded would be served very well with D. Crosscompiling and architecture support needs improvement though. I recently heard some praise for Go, which allegedly makes it easier than C or Rust.
I'm not sure about performance critical stuff. Maybe marketing C++-integration more could be helpful to get the people who rely on stuff like OpenCV, are forced to use C++ and dream about something better. We are fighting the C++ renaissance cool-aid, though. C++21 will surely solve all problems...
