Is D still alive?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:11:06 -0500, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:

> "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:op.vpxkvij9eav7ka at steve-laptop...
>> On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:25:10 -0500, Fab <fab-coding at web.de> wrote:
>>
>>> Are there any continued database projects?
>>
>> AFAIK, there is very little DB support (which will definitely need to be
>> addressed before D is considered a complete language) for D2.  However,
>> you *always* have support via C bindings.  D has zero-overhead binding  
>> to
>> C functions, all you need to do is port the declarations to D.
>>
>> If you are using D1, there are several projects, I don't think many of
>> them are up to date:
>>
>> http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DatabaseBindings
>>
>
> Adam Ruppe and Piotr Szturmaj have recently been working on some database
> stuff. See the recent thread "Can your programming language do this?"

I have ignored that thread (I sometimes just ignore threads because they  
start out uninteresting, or become uninteresting, and then I miss out on  
some good stuff!)

I'll have to take a look, D2 really does need a DB interface -- badly.

>> I would say it is not ready for prime-time yet.  It has a way to go, but
>> some have managed to build pretty impressive applications from it.  So  
>> it
>> would depend on your application.
>>
>
> Personally, I think that even though D still has some things to be worked
> out, I think it's *still* far better than any of the other more mature
> languages.

It all seems really good until you hit an issue that cannot be worked  
around -- like a compiler error or a misdesigned feature.  I call these  
'mercy' problems, because you are then at the complete mercy of someone  
else.  If you have a deadline, or have a complete stoppage in work, you  
really have little choice but to move onto another language or abandon the  
project.  Dcollections sat idle for about a year because of a problem like  
this.

That would scare the crap out of me if I was a project manager trying to  
decide whether to use D or not.  I've had first hand experience with using  
a product (from Microsoft) that failed so badly that we needed to have  
them fix it (which of course took about 3 months).  A year later, they  
discontinued the product, and we had even more problems.  I wrote my own  
system to replace it from scratch, and everything works so much better now  
(and uses less memory!).  Not to mention, we have all source, so it's  
always possible to fix.  A small part of it is written in D1/Tango and  
performs beautifully :)  But I'd probably not rewrite the server in D  
(currently in C#) because it's lacking too much support for a lot of the  
things I do with it.

I'd suggest to anyone looking to use D for something really big to try and  
"prove" out how well D will perform for you by coding up bits of your  
whole project that you think will be needed.  Hopefully, you can do  
everything without hitting a mercy bug and then you can write your full  
project in it.

There are also really scary possibilities that I've seen happen to a few  
poor souls -- like hard-to-solve OPTLINK bugs.  Those may creep up at any  
time.  Really, I just feel that D2's tools are not mature enough, or have  
enough support to trust a professional product on it -- yet.  I'm sure  
this will change in the future.

BTW, I plan to write a semi-professional project in D2 in the near future,  
but I'm 1) willing to take the risks 2) have no deadline and 3) not  
depending on this project for a living.

-Steve