D compilation is too slow and I am forking the compiler

Guillaume Piolat first.last at gmail.com
Mon Nov 26 16:53:59 UTC 2018


On Monday, 26 November 2018 at 16:21:39 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> In my opinion language adoption is a seduction/sales process 
>> very much like business-to-consumer is, the way I see it it's 
>> strikingly similar to marketing B2C apps, unless there will be 
>> no "impulse buy".
>
> I find that hard to believe: we are talking about a technical 
> tool here.

How many times have you been in this conversation:

--------------------------

- What language are you using?
- D.
- I know next to nothing about D.
- Oh, it's very good, I even built a business on it! <laundry 
list of arguments and features>.
- Oh no thanks. I should try Rust, it's secure, fast, modern blah 
blah; facts don't matter to me. But in reality I won't even learn 
a new language, I'm happy with a language without multi-threading.

--------------------------

It happens to me ALL THE TIME.
This pattern is so predictable it's becoming boring so now I just 
keep silent.

What happens? Rust / Go have outmarketed us with words.

The battle (of marketing) is on words not technical features, 
Rust happen to own "programming language" + "safety", what do we 
own? D is good in all kinds of directions and the marketing 
message is less simple.

The leaders choose to own the word "fast" (see our new motto 
"fast code, fast" which is very accurate) and it's important to 
get aligned.


> Also, regardless of how languages are chosen as they get into 
> the majority, D is very much still in the 
> innovators/early-adopters stage:

But the current state of D would very much accomodate the 
middle-of-the-curve adopters. The language rarely breaks stuff. 
People making money with it, making long-term bets.

Hell, I could make a laundry list of things that are better in D 
versus any alternatives! That doesn't bring users.


> With people like that, it's almost impossible to get them in 
> the early adopter stage. They will only jump on the bandwagon 
> once it's full, ie as part of the late majority.

There is a gap where we are, but "People like that" are almost 
everyone.

Those people actually are middle-of-the-curve adopter, if you see 
a true late adopter in the wild it takes 3 relatives programming 
in D so that they start to be interested.

Who doesn't want to be out of the early adopter stage, and get 
into the "officially endorsed safe choice" cohort?

D is remarkably ready as a safe choice for lots of software.


> Given how well it did on HN/reddit/lobste.rs, I think Vlad's 
> gamble probably paid off. We can't run the counterfactual of 
> choosing a safer title to see if it would have done even 
> better, let's just say it did well enough. ;)

Alternative darker view: ever remarked how D articles often goes 
downvoted on HN? The title who says something bad about D is 
upvoted ; it's easy to see events as going our way. I, for one, 
didn't really read the article. Who has time for that?



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