Is D a useful programming language for the web?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
news:hmob4s$pai$1 at digitalmars.com...
>I throw this subject up for the D community's consideration.
>
> Admittedly the subject is quite broad in scope.
>
> However, in response to some of my posts of time ago, people on this NG
> have said things along lines of "D is a Systems Programming Language so
> we want none of that", or words to that effect.
>
> So I'll play devil's advocate for a while and see what transpires.
>
> Regards to all,
>
> Justin Johansson
>

If I were managing my own web server I would *absolutely* use D. 
Unfortunately, damn near everything is shared-LAMP hosting these days. And 
while there may be better servers out there, as a programmer I rarely have 
any control over my client's or employer's servers or choice of host. So 
when I do web-dev (Ie, nearly all the damn time) I have to put up with that 
god-awful PHP instead. And when the only common ground available on the 
servers you deal with is PHP (as is typically the case, such as with me) 
then the *only* alternative to PHP (Ie something that can be compiled to 
PHP) is Haxe, which is certainly better than straight PHP, but it's still 
crap too (especially the package system...I mean, people sometimes complain 
about D's package system, but Haxe's is truly horrible, so bad that I'd 
almost prefer C/PHP-style includes).

D's great for web, *if*, as the programmer, you're lucky enough to have a 
high degree of control over the server. Usually you aren't that lucky. Which 
actually happens to be one of the main motivating factors for my Goldie 
project ( http://www.dsource.org/projects/goldie ). Eventually I want to get 
it to a point where it can handle languages like D and PHP, and have a 
strong, ultra-flexible and generalized AST system that knows how to emulate 
one set of language features with some other set of language features, so I 
can automate translation from whatever the hell language I want (say, D) to 
whatever the hell language I want (say, PHP). Yea, it'll run much slower on 
the server than normal natively-compiled D, but, well, that's what's gonna 
happen when some sysadmin insists on crap like PHP as a baseline, so screw 
'em, I say. If the sysadmin wants their server running fast then they can 
let me natively compile whatever the hell I need to, otherwise, tough shit 
to them.