Ben Gertzfield is our 11th mentor

[jasonw]

bearophile Wrote:

> Eric Poggel (JoeCoder):
> 
> > Are you allowed to comment on how Facebook is using D?  It would be very 
> > interesting to know.
> 
> It seems D at Facebook is becoming a bit like Go at Google :-)
> 
> Both firms use several languages (Google uses Python, a quite restricted C++, Java, JavaScript, Sawzall, a bit of Go, not-languages as Protocol Buffers, etc), both need to process very large amounts of data in reasonable time frames, and probably both firms feel the need of a language that's almost as fast as C++ (and C) but less bug-prone, simpler and able to lead to faster development, and apparently for them Java is not fit enough for this purpose (maybe for the Java lack of manual control of memory layout of data structures, that leads to higher heap memory usage and less performance in some cases).
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

D isn't tainted by any big "political" organization yet. For example Go is Google's, JVM stuff is dictated by Oracle, .NET stuff by Microsoft, Obj-C by Apple. I believe Facebook needs its own language and using D as this kind of political platform is a way to fight the other giant corporations.

Facebook also needs an incompatible language to improve their vendor lock-in later in coming markets. For example the rumored Facebook phone. It would be benefical for them to use some totally incompatible language to prevent code from leaking to other platforms, most notably Android and iOS. It would be benefical for D to be used as this kind of weapon because Facebook would pay the community and Walter a lot. D standard lib would also be incompatible with C libraries in other systems. I think it's a worthy goal, why should we pretend otherwise? No successful platform is politically neutral. Thoughts?