Who here actually uses D?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/1/11 6:22 PM, Robert Clipsham wrote:
> On 01/01/11 22:53, Ulrik Mikaelsson wrote:
>> All-in-all, I would rate my D-experience as a 3/5, not unacceptable,
>> but not reaching it's full potential either.
>
> I'm not sure I could rate my D experience with a single number, I'd
> probably have to plot it on an experience/time graph - guess it'd look
> somewhat like y=sin(x)+n, where n is just enough to tip me over the edge
> onto continued use of D, despite all the annoyances...
>
>> I still believe D has a lot of potential though, which is why I'm
>> sticking with it even when upfront-costs are a bit high. I.E. I'm
>> currently side-tracked working on developing and documenting a simple
>> safe Reference-Counting framework that might hopefully be included in
>> Tango and Druntime, instead of realizing my own ambitions of BitHorde.
>
> I've been using D for a good few years - and I have that same opinion -
> it has a lot of potential. In those years I'm yet to have seen that
> potential being released though. Wonder what's missing there.
>
> As for realising your own ambitions - I'm finding myself in a similar
> situation - the more I try and work on my project, the more I find
> myself not working on it as I try and improve the toolchain/work out
> bugs. It gets rather stressful at times, guess it introduces some
> variation into what I'm doing though. What it does mean is I spend a lot
> of time using C++ rather than D though...

Things are definitely improving. For example, I see there's some 
reminiscing about Variant. It was the first major Phobos component I 
wrote, and I remember when I was done I couldn't believe it the whole 
house of cards was standing together; I had to work little miracles 
around various compiler bugs.

The language has moved at a breakneck pace until this summer. Clearly 
there has been a change of phase since: no major features are being 
added and the focus has shifted on consolidating the implementation of 
what I believe is a very compelling design. The one thing that dampens 
progress on front-end quality is the 64 bit port, which is much slower 
than predicted. Even so, the recent releases have fixed an impressive 
number of bugs.

We also have a much extended library team. So I have good reasons to 
think that things are on a good course.


Andrei