Vision for the first semester of 2016

[Dibyendu Majumdar via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 25 January 2016 at 02:37:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Hot off the press! http://wiki.dlang.org/Vision/2016H1 -- Andrei

Hi,

I am new to D, and having my own language implementation (based 
off Lua) - therefore I think I can appreciate some of the 
difficulties around getting more contributors to D. For what its 
worth below are some thoughts on the H1 2016 priorities.

I am a would be D user - D is a tool that should help me get my 
job done. I guess the vast majority of potential users are in 
this bracket. To become a contributor requires one of the 
following - a) it must be your day job, i.e. someone paying you 
to work on the language, or b) you happen to have lots of free 
time and deeply interested in D's development, plus have the 
skills needed to contribute to D. I think that getting 
contributors to the core of D is going to be difficult. Most 
other languages/compilers that have big list of contributors 
usually have one or more large organisations funding the people 
working on the language. Rust, Go, Gcc, Clang, Java, C#, all fall 
into this category. I am not sure about Python, but I suspect 
companies like Google sponsored a lot of the work done in Python.

Assuming that above is correct and that you will only have a 
handful of people who can contribute to core D - then it seems to 
me that the effort needs to be a) least wasteful, and b) highly 
focused. Right now, there are multiple implementations of D 
compiler - DMD, GDC, LDC, SDC - here you have a bunch of people 
who obviously have the time, the knowledge and the desire to 
develop D. Yet the effort is spread out into several different 
implementations, and therefore wasteful. Why not form a core 
group and settle on one implementation and everyone focus on 
that? I know this is very hard as no one would be willing to give 
up their creation, but for the greater good of D? Perhaps you 
could assess each implementation and settle on the one that has 
the most technical merit and future proofing?

As a D user who wishes to use D as a better C / C++ - my personal 
needs are following:

a) D should work on the three major platforms - Windows, Linux 
and OSX.
b) It should be possible to write code in D that one would have 
written in C / C++ - i.e. let the programmer have full control.
c) A good debugger on all supported platforms is essential for 
any complex language.
d) A good IDE is essential to attract users accustomed to 
Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio.
e) A core library that handles the most basic stuff.
f) Ability to easily import C libraries. I struggled with htod - 
haven't tried dstep yet - but implementing tooling based on Clang 
seems sensible.

The need to have a good standard GUI toolkit is not so great 
these days as users are moving away from Desktop applications.

I realise that interfacing with C++ seems like a big goal - but 
to be honest this isn't important to me. C++ isn't the standard 
for cross language interfacing ... C is.

Regards
Dibyendu