On Wednesday, 31 January 2018 at 07:56:37 UTC, Andrew Benton
wrote:
On Tuesday, 30 January 2018 at 20:45:44 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
https://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-D-started-to-replace-C++
Andrei
I think that the largest issue there is probably the marketing
and advocacy. When Rust was about the same share as D, it had
much better marketing. Someone was running their twitter
channel and working to make the language much more visible. D
flat out doesn't have that.
If I had to pick a second issue, it's that the ecosystem story
is hard compared to other languages. New programmers aren't
certain what to choose or how to get their environment up and
running. Compared against Rust, Go, and Java we have horrible
ecosystem fragmentation. E.g. three compilers, two separate
languages for dub
I agree that marketing is a pretty serious problem for D. Many
people just aren't aware of it. Even for people who do not
program in the newer languages, Rust and Go are already well
known to anybody who uses C# or C/C++ or Java, and even many
Python or JavaScript programmers. D is often looked over and not
visible enough on people's radars for them to even notice it,
which is hugely disappointing as I've no doubt many would come to
realise that it offers much of what they're looking for.
Marketing is definitely failing the language here, but
considering we don't have some huge company backing D, it's doing
fairly well on its own. I just worry it's not enough to rely on
word-of-mouth because it doesn't seem to be enough.
Personally I don't find the ecosystem to be a huge problem any
more than C++'s is a problem. I can install DMD and LDC and,
if/when I want/need to, I can tell rdmd to build using LDC. I am
glad to have options, as I don't feel that they hinder my use of
D.
