Right now, what's the most important for the success and adoption of D?

[Bruno Medeiros]

I think the key ingredients of the success of a language are the 
language itself, the available libraries (both standard and not), and 
development tools(compiler, build tools, debuggers, IDEs).

In D's current state, for me the most important things affecting usage 
of D would by far be an IDE (with semantic features) and an integrated 
debugger. This outweighs by a large margin any upcoming or imaginable 
language features or changes D might have (even though I can think of a 
lot of them I'd like to see).

One of the reasons I made this thread is because I'm surprised that few 
people also consider and IDE and/or debugger to be the top issues.

Last semester I had a game programming college course whose work 
consisted entirely in making a game engine (no exams or anything else). 
I had the full choice of language to use, and although I know D (and its 
ecosystem) pretty well, I chose to do the project in C++. Why? Although 
I find the D language quite superior to C++, bottomline I would be 
significantly more productive in C++ due to the quality of Visual Studio 
C++ 2005, namely having "intellisense" and the high quality VS debugger, 
which were both highly superior to what D had available at the time.
If I had the same choice now, things might be different. With Mmrnmhrm's 
latest semantic functionality, which I think is "pretty close" to VS 
2005's semantic capabilites, I think I would be fine in that regard. As 
for debugging, I'm still trying out Descent+ddbg, so I don't know how 
solid that is yet.
But even if now I would prefer D over C++, I would still be rating IDE 
and debugger functionality above any others. I guess if were to do other 
kinds of development other than game programming (like server 
programming) it might increase the importance of other issues, like 
libraries, or compiler issues, but I'd likely still rank IDE and 
debugger pretty high, and language features/changes low* .

* relatively low, I'm not saying language features/changes are not 
important.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D