Would You Bet $100,000,000 on D?

[Peter Alexander]

I recently stumbled across this (old) blog post: 
http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html

In summary, the author asks if you were offered $100,000,000 for some 
big software project, would you use your pet programming language?

This is interesting, because if we answer "no" then it forces us to 
think about the reasons why we would *not* use D, and perhaps those 
concerns are what we should be focusing on?

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To get the ball rolling, here are the reasons I would not use D for a 
big project with high stakes:

1. If I had to port to ARM, or PowerPC, or some other architecture then 
I would very likely have trouble finding a compiler and other tools up 
to the task. I wouldn't have that problem with (say) Java or C.

2. I'm not convinced that any of the available compilers would cope with 
a very large code base. I don't know what the largest D2 project is, but 
I think I would be right in saying that it has less than 1 MLOC.

3. Depending on what the project was, I would probably be worried about 
available libraries. If, for example, the project required the use of 
DirectX, I'd just use C++.

4. I'd be worried about garbage collector performance, although this is 
less of a concern than the others because it's not too difficult to work 
around if you know you need performance up ahead.

5. If I did use D, I would (and do) force myself to use only simple 
features. I would be too scared of the type system blowing up, or 
obscure template errors causing pain. One error I always seem to get 
when using Phobos is that it can't find a match for a function because 
the types somehow didn't pass the template constraints for some obscure 
reason. When there are multiple constraints, you don't know which is 
failing. Often it is due to the complicated const/immutable/shared parts 
of the type system.

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Essentially, I agree with his conclusion in the post. Tools and 
libraries would be my biggest concerns (in that order). The fact that D 
(usually) makes things easier for me barely registered when thinking 
about this.