Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Trass3r]

Jarrett Billingsley schrieb:
> On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Walter
> Bright<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> Much of D's improvements appear to be small, but the aggregate is large
>> enough that once you write a project in D, you'll find it pretty hard to go
>> back to another language.
> 
> This is EXACTLY the point I always try to make to newcomers.  It's so
> significant that I think it should be on the front page of the
> language spec, in bold, 72 point, red letters.

Seconded.
Even though the road is paved with obstacles I can't imagine going back 
to C++ or any other language.


By obstacles I mean among others:
- D1<->D2 and Phobos<->Tango problem - esp. when creating a library that 
shall be compilable with any combination the end user wants you have to 
use a lot of versions and aliases to accommodate that, like it is done 
in DFL.

- dozens of more or less abandoned projects that aren't usable with 
latest compilers anymore,
- furthermore many users tend to maintaining their own fork rather than 
contributing to the project, thus useful functionality is often spread 
and sometimes even unknown cause the fork isn't publicly available

- lack of IDEs, Descent is pretty good (and the only one regularly 
updated), but still has a long way to go. It's only reasonably usable 
with dsss, but rebuild is horribly outdated and always gets trapped in 
an infinite loop when using D2 and sometimes also refuses to work with D1.

xf.build is still in the early stages and using the compiler directly is 
out of question.

The newly added -deps parameter is probably a step forward, but wouldn't 
it be possible to simply include that rebuild functionality in dmd?
I mean if it is possible to scan the dependencies and write them to a 
file, it shouldn't be that hard to simply add those found modules to the 
"working queue", should it?

Build tools could then concentrate on the stuff dsss actually does like 
project management, installing and so on (which it does in a brilliant 
way imho, I really like the dsss.conf style)