2011/1/2 Robert Clipsham <rob...@octarineparrot.com>: > Unfortunately, it's impossible to create such a system without people being > paid to work on dmd and the runtime - people will fix the bugs they want to, > you can't make them fix anything. Obviously you can influence what gets > fixed, not to a huge extent though. Ideally the voting system would outline > what needs the most effort, but people don't idle on bugzilla enough for it > to work so well. I wonder if changing the 'vote' button to a 'like' button > would make any difference, if facebook's any indication, people like to like > things ;p Personally, I think the community is a key focus area. D cannot survive without a thriving community, both in the "core projects" (language design, compilers, stdlibs, druntime etc.), and in applications (especially highly visible killer-apps). I think it's absolutely critical to work on advocating the language, especially I feel D is currently missing "killer-apps" demonstrating why learning D is worthwhile.
Let's be honest, coming into the market of C-style imperative languages in the second half of this past decade isn't exactly easy. There are already C/C++ for the performance-crazed, and Java/C# for the convenience-minded. The only complaint I ever hear in that landscape, is that C/C++ is just too much hazzle to work with, and C#/Java is ridiculously resource-hungry, partly in CPU but even more so regarding RAM consumption. Of course most users don't care, but the few passionate developers feeling this, THEY are the audience D appeals to. I think it's important to intentionally target them in advocacy. D cannot succeed in doing everything. It certainly cannot compete with Ada on writing secure stable code, and it cannot compete with C in low-level programming simply due to the sheer established mass. The one area where there is currently an unexploited opportunity is in the corner between productive yet efficient, and this is where D shines, which most developers currently do not know. On a side-note (and I'm clearly biased here so I hardly even take myself very seriously), I think the non-windows os:es, especially Linux, should also be an intentional focus-area. It is VERY difficult to compete with .NET on Windows, and somehow I don't think we'll find most of the efficiency-focused audience there, but if D can demonstrate it's usefulness in key systems components in Linux, it's likely to attract more curious right-minded developers. I'm not sure exactly how to realize this, but there may be two opportunities in quickly providing a lightwheight attractive desktop environment for the upcoming Wayland system, as well as someone finally writing a disk-indexing system that doesn't eat all your disk-bandwidth and ram during the first week. In any case, I think it's also very important to remember developers should only make up a small part of a good community, even a software development community. We need webdesigners, advocates, testers, people doing bugzilla maintenance, documentation experts, writers, artists, and just about anyone who can spare a couple of hours of the week since they want more efficient software (even if they don't know how to do it themselves). Just discovering http://d-programming-language.org/ with much nicer presentation of the docs I've already seen, raised my motivation for D just as much as any random dozen solved bugs from bugzilla. Attracting people to D is IMHO MUCH more important than any particular bug or especially new feature. If I got my wish, I would very much like to see some of the core devs allocating 75% of their time of for the next months on not doing core work, but ONLY doing things to attract new developers; I.E. * Try to get D into the Debian Language Shootout Again? * A simple web-server beating apache performance (maybe even nginx?) would be a reasonable goal, which would make great headlines, and in short time. If you can also show it's source-code is comprehensible to any medium-skilled Java dev, you've probably got yourself many new prospective developers. * Follow up new developers with top-notch support for the more promising ones to make sure they don't bounce back out. * Brush up the documentation aimed at beginners, and try to get a few articles and tutorials published (at least slashdotted) Given these above, which to my knowledge isn't done as of now, I think it's not unreasonable to expect a sizable growth in both active community and external visibility. Now, time for me to go to bed. (It's 06:00 here) when I wake up later today, I'm hoping to have the list full of further ideas, suggestions and thoughts on how to grow the community, except for implementing D3/4/5 100% bugfree. :)