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D 2.096 and other news

dlang.org

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Re: D 2.096 and other news

#2
Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all?

Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days.

Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka).

Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist).

Haven’t used D in quite a few years, but I’m thinking about playing around again soon.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#5

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

Started exploring D recently and my experience has been that the community is a bit isolated but not nonexistent. You can find answers for most questions but most of those will be in the D forum. There are some good books though.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#6

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

Imho, D's choice to be garbage collected has prevented wider adoption (that's the case for my usage at least). And as a compiled gc language, it competes squarely with golang, something that's likely hard to do, given the corporate (google) support golang has.

Side note: I met the creater of D, Walter Bright (also of course famous for the digital mars compiler) at going native 2013 (now known as cppcon). Bright was the nicest guy, and was happy to field my questions. We even chatted about rust, which was just a twinkle at the time!

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#8

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

Imho, D's choice to be garbage collected has prevented wider adoption (that's the case for my usage at least). And as a compiled gc language, it competes squarely with golang, something that's likely hard to do, given the corporate (google) support golang has. Side note: I met the creater of D, Walter Bright (also of course famous for the digital mars compiler) at going native 2013 (now known as cppcon). Bright was t…

Interestingly, Crystal and Nim also seem to be getting more press than D. And Crystal is more of a direct Go competitor than D is.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#9

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

Certainly D has a lot of support for hobbyists and solo developers, but hasn't seen much adoption from industry.

It's a tough language to sell to a large organization. When you're a solo developer D gives you the flexibility and freedom to pursue the many different paradigms that it supports and create your own mini-dialect of the language that suits you perfectly. You can sprinkle some garbage collection here if you want, some meta programming there if you'd like, or narrow things down to a barebones strongly typed C-like language. There's a great deal of exploratory freedom in that respect.

When you're in industry, those freedoms can become liabilities because you end up paying the cost of the language supporting things you have no use for. I don't want to pay for D's garbage collector and I don't large teams all writing up elaborate template metaprograms that have to be maintained. If I wanted a garbage collector, then C# or Java is almost certainly the better choice. If metaprogramming is what I want, I'd use a Lisp dialect like Clojure. For any specific feature D has that would be a major selling point or competitive advantage for my company, there's another language that is almost certainly far better suited to providing it. There isn't one single language that does everything D has, but there's also no single project that would want to make use of all those features, and this becomes very apparent when you see how fractured the D community is and how many mini-dialects of the language there are. Do I support GC or not? Do I make it compatible with betterC or not (meaning exception support).

Having a kitchen sink like language results in those kinds of trade-offs. Good language for carving out a niche for yourself that can adapt to your specific style of programming and give you as an individual a great deal of expressive freedom... bad for when you need to coordinate with a large team and buckle down on a small set of rigorous and specialized features that are likely better served by using a tool focused on delivering it.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#10

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

Imho, D's choice to be garbage collected has prevented wider adoption (that's the case for my usage at least). And as a compiled gc language, it competes squarely with golang, something that's likely hard to do, given the corporate (google) support golang has. Side note: I met the creater of D, Walter Bright (also of course famous for the digital mars compiler) at going native 2013 (now known as cppcon). Bright was t…

As just one anecdote, the mere presence of a GC made me stop looking at D more or less immediately. In terms of positioning, I think D would be better served focusing on a vertical.
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