I have a plan.. I really DO

[Ecstatic Coder]

On Tuesday, 10 July 2018 at 18:20:27 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 05:25:11PM +0000, Yuxuan Shui via 
> Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> On Friday, 6 July 2018 at 21:15:46 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> [...]
>> > Of course, for someone looking for an excuse not to use D, 
>> > they will always find another reason why this is not 
>> > sufficient. But that only strengthens the point that the GC 
>> > is just a convenient excuse not to use D.
>> 
>> Not a good excuse to not fix GC, though.
>
> Of course.  The current GC, while decent, does leave lots of 
> room for improvement.  Unfortunately, while much talked about, 
> not many people are willing to actually put in the work to 
> improve it.  So I'm not really interested in generating more 
> talk, as opposed to action.
>
>
>> > Solve that problem, and they will just move on to the next 
>> > excuse, because the GC is not the real reason; the real 
>> > reason is probably non-technical. Like good ole inertia: 
>> > people are lazy and set in their ways, and resist changing 
>> > what they've grown comfortable with. But actually admitting 
>> > this would make them look bad, so it is easier to find a 
>> > convenient excuse like the GC (or whatever else is different 
>> > from the status quo).
>> 
>> If that's the case, then we are doom. We might just as well 
>> forget about getting popular, and instead spend time making 
>> the language better.
>
> I have always been skeptical of popularity.  It is neither a 
> necessary nor sufficient condition for improved language 
> quality.  That's not to say we should not invest effort in 
> marketing D... but popularity does not imply technical 
> superiority, and the only reason I'm here is because of D's 
> technical superiority.
>
>
>> Like fixing the GC.
>
> Nobody argues *against* fixing the GC.  But, who will actually 
> do it? As opposed to the crowds who are very willing to only 
> talk about it.
>
>
>> (Although I don't quite agree with you. Some people DO resist 
>> change, that's why some decades old languages are still 
>> popular. But look at the popularity of new languages like Go, 
>> and Rust, and the ever-change landscape of front-end 
>> development. There're tons of people who adapt certain 
>> technology just because it is new, why can't that happen to D?)
> [...]
>
> Those who adapt technology merely because it's new, are what I 
> call the bandwagon jumpers. They will flock to the next brand 
> new thing, and then just as readily leave in droves once the 
> novelty has worn off. They are unreliable customers, and I 
> wouldn't build a business based on their continuing support.  
> Again, popularity is orthogonal to technical excellence.
>
>
> T

Except for Crystal, I think that D is superior to many languages 
in *ease of use* and *expressivity*, and I really like it a lot 
for that.

But for technical aspect like performance, very honestly I'm 
still not sure of its technical superiority over similar 
languages.

For instance, I'm personally convinced that a Go web server can 
often beat its vibe.d equivalent in technical aspects like raw 
performance, memory consumption, multi-core usage, etc.

And even if benchmarks are always to be interpreted cautiously, 
when several of them lead to exactly the same conclusion as my 
own tests, and with such big margins, it's very hard to 
completely ignore them.

Just have a look at this one, which is quite famous :

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

I know that many people here will simply tell me that all those 
personal et external benchmarks are all wrong, etc.

Maybe you are right.

But in terms of communication, wouldn't it be much more effective 
that the D experts of this forum simply fix the open source code 
of those benchmarks to make D's technical superiority much more 
obvious, so that the decision makers of software development 
companies, which stupidly use the informations of such benchmarks 
when investigating alternative technologies, can more easily 
suggest to their leadership to switch to D ?