SerpentOS departs from Dlang

[ryuukk_]

On Friday, 15 September 2023 at 17:39:41 UTC, M.M. wrote:
> In February there were some exciting news on the usage of dlang 
> within serpent-os linux distribution, quite a large open source 
> project of Ikey Doherty and the team around him.
>
> Unfortunately, the project decided to leave dlang behind, and 
> to embrace golang and rust instead... in part due to some 
> hiccups in dlang and due to contributors pushing for more 
> mainstream languages:
>
> https://serpentos.com/blog/2023/09/06/oxidised-moss/
>
> Pity that it did not succeed. It would be a great showcase for 
> the marvelous dlang.

That's unfortunate..

Ikey seems to still want to use D, so the main driving factor is 
the contributors, i wonder what are the exact reasons, pseudo 
memory safety can't be the only reason

To be honest, I wouldn't blame contributors for looking at more 
mainstream languages, who still want to do their switch cases 
this way:

```D
switch (it)
{
     case MySuperLongEnum.MySuperLongValueA:
        result = do_something_a();
     break;
     case MySuperLongEnum.MySuperLongValueB:
        result = do_something_b();
     break;
     case MySuperLongEnum.MySuperLongValueC:
        result = do_something_c();
     break;
}
```

When other languages have it cleaner:

```D
result = switch (it)
{
     .MySuperLongValueA: do_something_a();
     .MySuperLongValueB: do_something_b();
     .MySuperLongValueC: do_something_c();
}
```

Improving ergonomics won't necessarily attract people, probably 
not, but i'm pretty sure that'll make contributors of existing 
projects not request to change language because the ergonomics 
are so poor

Even C# understand that and made the appropriate changes across 
their language and even improve their compiler to avoid the urge 
to switch to Go (NativeAOT), even Java made appropriate language 
changes in hope to stay relevant, why only D should be frozen? 
Acting like the world depend on D

D has many benefits, but some areas need lot of love, this 
reminds me of this dude in an online chat, he said the reason why 
he stick to Rust was because of Rust's enum.. not because of 
memory safety

Hopefully more wake up calls like this one will resonate with the 
D foundation