Why D isn't the next "big thing" already

Seb via Digitalmars-d-learn digitalmars-d-learn at puremagic.com
Wed Jul 27 09:26:47 PDT 2016


On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why 
> people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big 
> thing" already.
>
> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing 
> web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js 
> for example.
>
> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right 
> tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have 
> other opinion on thoses questions.

My personal opinion is that the two biggest problems are

1) it has no unique selling point (USP):

Rust - memory-safety, Go/NodeJS - web app, Python/Julia - 
scientific computing, R - statistics, Matlab/Mathematica/Octave - 
numerical programming, Haskell -
pure functional, C - kernels, controllers, embedded

While the Areas of D Usage 
(https://dlang.org/areas-of-d-usage.html) is just a brief 
overview, D can compete with all of these areas.

2) It has no big player with money behind it.
Rust (Mozilla), Go (Google), NodeJs (Joyent), ... - having 
dedicated resources helps a lot to let a project takeoff.

That being said it's an awesome language that can rule them all, 
adoption is rising slowly, but steadily & hopefully with the D 
Foundation being a non-profit organization real money 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/qaskprdxmshpabarahbf@forum.dlang.org) flows in.


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