Would You Bet $100,000,000 on D?

[mountain.li]

Peter Alexander Wrote:
Yes

> I recently stumbled across this (old) blog post: 
> http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html
> 
> In summary, the author asks if you were offered $100,000,000 for some 
> big software project, would you use your pet programming language?
> 
> This is interesting, because if we answer "no" then it forces us to 
> think about the reasons why we would *not* use D, and perhaps those 
> concerns are what we should be focusing on?
> 
> ---
> 
> To get the ball rolling, here are the reasons I would not use D for a 
> big project with high stakes:
> 
> 1. If I had to port to ARM, or PowerPC, or some other architecture then 
> I would very likely have trouble finding a compiler and other tools up 
> to the task. I wouldn't have that problem with (say) Java or C.
> 
> 2. I'm not convinced that any of the available compilers would cope with 
> a very large code base. I don't know what the largest D2 project is, but 
> I think I would be right in saying that it has less than 1 MLOC.
> 
> 3. Depending on what the project was, I would probably be worried about 
> available libraries. If, for example, the project required the use of 
> DirectX, I'd just use C++.
> 
> 4. I'd be worried about garbage collector performance, although this is 
> less of a concern than the others because it's not too difficult to work 
> around if you know you need performance up ahead.
> 
> 5. If I did use D, I would (and do) force myself to use only simple 
> features. I would be too scared of the type system blowing up, or 
> obscure template errors causing pain. One error I always seem to get 
> when using Phobos is that it can't find a match for a function because 
> the types somehow didn't pass the template constraints for some obscure 
> reason. When there are multiple constraints, you don't know which is 
> failing. Often it is due to the complicated const/immutable/shared parts 
> of the type system.
> 
> ---
> 
> Essentially, I agree with his conclusion in the post. Tools and 
> libraries would be my biggest concerns (in that order). The fact that D 
> (usually) makes things easier for me barely registered when thinking 
> about this.