I wanted to thank the D community for getting us involved in GSoC and
giving me the opportunity to attend the Mentor Summit, which was this
weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most hardcore
programmers have at least heard of D by now, at least if the Mentor
Summit was a representative sample of hardcore programmers that I had
never talked to before. There seemed to be substantial interest in it
from the informal conversations I had over meals, etc.
I got the impression that D is not being used partly because of the
obvious reasons (lack of libraries, legacy code in other languages) but
also partly because most people, even if they've heard of it, don't know
what its most important features/benefits are. I think that we need to
develop a short, memorable "elevator speech" version of its selling
points, even if we ignore some substantial areas in doing so. The one I
used was basically "compile-time metaprogramming on steroids, static if,
CTFE, string mixins, see std.algorithm, std.range and std.parallelism
for examples".
I was also frequently asked about D's compatibility with C and C++. The
impression I get is that we would do well to highlight our ease of
integrating with C more in our marketing, especially now that we have
Deimos.
BTW, Fawzi Mohammed was also at the Mentor Summit and may have
additional comments. I'd be interested to see him weigh in on this thread.
- GSoC Mentor Summit Observations and D Marketing dsimcha
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