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OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

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Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#21

Post by pstuart »

TheCondor wrote: post #10
Kranar wrote: post #7

D is such a sad case of how a good technical product can fail due to poor leadership and decision making. A language is more than just a compiler, it's also an ecosystem and a community. D's community is actually very welcoming but man, watch some of the DConf videos and Q&As on Youtube and it's cringe seeing key leaders talking down to people, or dismissing people's concerns, or just have this ego about themselves l…

Maybe they shouldn’t bring D back to life… drop the name, make a clean break and come up with a new one.

Let's call it E.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#23

Post by Klonoar »

LorenDB wrote: post #15
TillE wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++. Rust is sufficiently compelling, with its focus on memory safety.

Meanwhile Rust is noncompelling due to its syntax. It made a bunch of weird design choices (like putting class methods in separate `impl` blocks) that have ruined my chances of trying to use it for any personal projects.

That’s a subjective matter of taste.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#24

Post by lifthrasiir »

TillE wrote: post #9
Kranar wrote: post #7

D is such a sad case of how a good technical product can fail due to poor leadership and decision making. A language is more than just a compiler, it's also an ecosystem and a community. D's community is actually very welcoming but man, watch some of the DConf videos and Q&As on Youtube and it's cringe seeing key leaders talking down to people, or dismissing people's concerns, or just have this ego about themselves l…

I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++. Rust is sufficiently compelling, with its focus on memory safety.

I felt the opposite back when I was using D (specifically, D1). It was obvious that everything you can do in C++ can be done in D in so much easier way that it could have replaced C++ in a near future if done right. This is even true when we compare D1 with the current C++20, so I believe D did have a good chance that was wasted somehow.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#25

Post by School-Cotton »

LorenDB wrote: post #15
TillE wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++. Rust is sufficiently compelling, with its focus on memory safety.

Meanwhile Rust is noncompelling due to its syntax. It made a bunch of weird design choices (like putting class methods in separate `impl` blocks) that have ruined my chances of trying to use it for any personal projects.

That’s one of the most trivial imaginable reasons for choosing one language over another.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#27

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

TillE wrote: post #9
Kranar wrote: post #7

D is such a sad case of how a good technical product can fail due to poor leadership and decision making. A language is more than just a compiler, it's also an ecosystem and a community. D's community is actually very welcoming but man, watch some of the DConf videos and Q&As on Youtube and it's cringe seeing key leaders talking down to people, or dismissing people's concerns, or just have this ego about themselves l…

I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++. Rust is sufficiently compelling, with its focus on memory safety.

Rust is a really frustrating language for me: I understand the safety it provides but find the pain of actually using it makes it uncompelling. Plus, the Rewrite it in Rust movement is very off-putting

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#28

Post by neilv »

In the last decade, we've had many learning experiences around governance of programming languages.

Most of the changing languages that come to mind, I realize, that they, too, had a big upset or oops related to governance.

I now think one of the key things to look for in a programming language is governance -- what they say about how they do it, what they actually do, how that's working out so far, and how you think that will work out in the future.

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#29

Post by LorenDB »

Klonoar wrote: post #23
LorenDB wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile Rust is noncompelling due to its syntax. It made a bunch of weird design choices (like putting class methods in separate `impl` blocks) that have ruined my chances of trying to use it for any personal projects.

That’s a subjective matter of taste.

Yes, but I think you'll find that many people tend to resist change, including drastic syntactic changes (as compared to how languages like D iterate on previous languages like C++).

Re: OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions

#30

Post by johnbingus »

LorenDB wrote: post #15
TillE wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fundamental problem with D is much simpler than that, it's the technical context. D is a better C++, but it's not better enough to escape the gravitational pull of C++. Rust is sufficiently compelling, with its focus on memory safety.

Meanwhile Rust is noncompelling due to its syntax. It made a bunch of weird design choices (like putting class methods in separate `impl` blocks) that have ruined my chances of trying to use it for any personal projects.

I actually quite like that, because it makes it clear that the impl blocks aren't class methods, they're trait implementations. Maybe they could have chosen a better keyword, but having traits (aka typeclasses) instead of classes helps you mitigate the expression problem[1] and some other nasty things quite a bit.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expression_problem

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