On Tuesday, 2 January 2018 at 04:43:42 UTC, codephantom wrote:
Well, consider the silent 'minority' too, who still think that increasing performance, and reducing demands on resources, still matter, a lot, and that we shouldn't just surrender this just to make programmers more 'productive' (i.e so they can ship slower GC code, more quickly).
I think most of the people in this minority (which actually I think was a majority a few years back) has given up on D as a production language. I am certainly in that group. It is starting to be a bit late to change direction now IMO. I mean, it is still possible, but that would require a mentality shift, which has been surprisingly difficult to establish.
Given the increased availability of memory in computers I think an application language with built in compiler-supported arena allocator will be a big win, but the only mainstream language that is going for this seems to be Golang. (Go is an application language, not a systems language).
What it really comes down to though, is language designers ensuring that any language that defines itself as a 'modern systems programming language', gives control 'to the programmer', and not the other way around.
Right now, I think only C++ and Rust fits the "modern system programming" description… GC and refcounting is for application level programming, so it shouldn't even be on the table as a core solution for that domain.
But D seems to be content with application level programming and that's ok too, but a bit misleading if you also say that you aim to be the best language for low level programming… I don't really think it is possible to be good at both without a massive budget.
You have to pick what you want to be good at. And that is the main problem with the evolution of D; a lack of commitment to a specific niche.
