How is the D programming language financed?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/23/10 4:49 PM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> I think the bread and butter support
>> is as rock solid in both languages.
>
> I agree. For my day to day work, I'm pretty conservative in the
> use of the language; 90% of my code is probably best characterized
> as "a better C".
>
> Interestingly though, I use a template of some sort about once
> every five lines... Variant.get, std.conv.to, my own mysql.query,
> and several other little ones get heavy, but discreet use.)
>
> Anyway, I very rarely encounter D bugs in any of the code, and
> virtually never in that simpler bulk of it. The edges may be
> rough, but the core kicks ass.
>
> I've spent less time fighting bugs in the last year of D than I
> did reading php.net/strpos and php.net/str_replace in the previous
> year of PHP!

This post is a breath of fresh air (as is the subsequent expanded one).

There's a risk on this newsgroup to get stuck in a sort of limbo mode, 
in which the analysis of increasingly narrow corner cases loses focus on 
a few larger issues. Granted, we _must_ leave no nooks and crannies 
unexplored, but we also shouldn't spend disproportionate amounts of time 
on those at the expense of getting work done in D.

D is a great language to work in /right now/. It has amazing 
capabilities, allows defining complex designs with ease, and it's a 
pleasure to code in overall. We need a fair amount of more good quality 
libraries, most of which can be written with the current implementation 
of the language. We could also use success stories of use of language 
for writing compelling programs. All of these are possible _today_ even 
if e.g. lazily updated (memoized) members in otherwise const structs and 
classes are not yet available.

Spending inordinate time worrying about fractal details may take one to 
the point where all work is paralyzed by endless dwell in the "design 
study" land. As inevitably most design decisions involve tradeoffs, the 
one way to see if it all works is to get work done in the language.


Andrei