Why we chose not to use D for our Linux project

[torhu]

Bill Lear wrote:
> Sadly, we have given up on using D for our Linux project, despite my hopes and favorable overall impression of the D language.  I thought I would share briefly our reasons in hopes that the information is useful to those in the D community.
> 
> We are writing a distributed media publishing system that uses a relational database to store media programming schedules and other related information.  We need a language that has a library that provides easy database access (something along the lines of Perl's DBI, for example), CGI programming support, access to system-level routines, reasonable performance, YAML support, and other features.
> 
> We came to a quick conclusion that D wasn't going to work, as the DBI code proffered on dsource has apparently been abandoned and does not come close to compiling with the current dmd (1.028 or 1.029) compiler.  We had a laborious run-around trying to figure out if DBI requires Tango or Phobos, wrestled with the "bud" make-ish system, and finally gave up in disgust --- it just wasn't going to work without serious effort.

Did you ask on the newsgroup or the ddbi forum?  These questions are 
easily answered by almost anyone familiar with how things work D world. 
  The last commit in ddbi svn[1] was two weeks ago, so it's reasonable 
to assume that ddbi works with dmd 1.028, which is the latest stable 
compiler version[2].  From reading the log, it's also clear that Tango 
is supported, and Phobos support has been removed.

And the version in svn also seems to support building with dsss, which I 
would recommend over bud for linux use.  Of course, this assumes that 
you're prepared to use an unreleased, work-in-progress version of the 
library...

That said, I agree that the state of D tools and libraries is not what 
it should have been.  Most projects are run by a single person, some 
work well on one platform but not others, etc.  Some projects are of 
good quality though, the best example probably being Tango.  Another 
problem is that dsource doesn't give you a way to distinguish the 
mature, actively maintained projects from the ones that are abandoned or 
not quite ready yet.

[1] http://www.dsource.org/projects/ddbi/log/
[2] http://www.digitalmars.com/d/download.html