If D becomes a failure, what's the key reason, do you think?

Mike Capp mike.capp at gmail.com
Fri Jul 7 05:26:55 PDT 2006


What a cheery topic.

In article <e8kp39$1fol$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Dave says...
>
>[...] I don't think the market for a "better than C & 
>cleaner than C++" statically compiled language has died. I'm not aware 
>of any language like that out there anyhow, certainly not in this stage 
>of development.

Depending on what you're doing, some would say that languages like Eiffel, Ada
and Delphi qualify as "like that". (Ada '83 was painfully restrictive, but the
latest '05 version looks to be saner and has some interesting features - has
anyone played with it?)

>Don't get me wrong - D is absolutely great incrementally (one of the 
>goals), but IMHO there probably will have to be a major differentiator 
>for it to really catch fire.

Agreed. C survives (and will continue to survive) as a portable assembler and as
the de facto lingua franca for native code. C++ survives (and will continue to
survive) though inertia; its total lack of ABI is such a train wreck that large
C++ codebases are very hard to migrate to anything else.

I suspect that over the next few years the big thing that's going to force
significant numbers of programmers to jump language is the need to take
advantage of heavily multicore CPUs. I'm not sure D is functional enough to hop
on that approaching bandwagon, so its window of opportunity may be quite narrow.





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