Vision document for H1 2018

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 03/10/2018 05:47 AM, Dylan Graham wrote:
> On Saturday, 10 March 2018 at 10:05:49 UTC, rumbu wrote:
>>
>> According to the State of D Survey, 71% of the respondents don't care 
>> about betterC. Why is betterC on the priority list?
> 
> Yeah. Why should D worry about tying itself into C when it can't even 
> interface with itself through DLLs?

First of all, betterC is about far more than interfacing with C. In 
fact, interop with C isn't really what betterC is about at all - that's 
a separate aspect of the language. (And those C/C++ users who still 
haven't come to D - for many of them the holdout is *because* of the 
issues betterC aims to address. Make no mistake, for all the stockholm 
syndrome in the C and C++ worlds, there *are* a lot people openly 
wanting to jump ship but don't have a sufficient option yet. Heck, *I'm* 
a C/C++ -> D convert.)

But more importantly:

The D language itself is specifically designed and intended to be 
multi-purpose. Because of that, D users (and potential D users) are 
*highly* diverse. Everybody here has their own use-cases, their own 
needs and priorities, and their own list of things they want fixed 
yesterday.

In a group this diverse, there just simply *isn't* much on the D 
wishlist that's crucially important to a *majority*, because we all need 
completely different things.

Personally, better DLL support have little to no impact on me. Obviously 
it does for you, and I sympathise. Some of the things most important to 
me for D to improve you probably wouldn't care one bit about - and 
that's ok. We work on different sorts of things.

Improved betterC is something I would find very nice if I ever have time 
or opportunity to get back into embedded software. But outside of that, 
yea, it doesn't impact me much more than it does for you.

But here's the rub: In this crowd here, probably far more than most 
languages, we all have such wildly varying needs that 29% *is* what 
qualifies as significant around here. Most wishlist items are going to 
have similarly non-majority numbers. And they have to pick *something* 
to focus on. Luckily, as the vision document clearly states, there are 
*several* such "somethings" the dlang foundation is committing to 
working on.