D has 22 place at the Tiobe index

Rikki Cattermole alphaglosined at gmail.com
Wed Dec 25 21:55:06 PST 2013


>> Game development definitely. But for that we need somebody to 
>> actually build a pretty good game engine and then show it off 
>> using a game.
> Benjamin Thaut wrote a nice game demo, there may be more out 
> there:
>
> http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20

Not quite enough to show this off though.

>> I think web development is where our biggest potential is for. 
>> Not actually scientific or mathematical in nature.
>> Because of this, part of my design with DOOGLE is to make the 
>> abstraction in such a way that it should be possible to build 
>> almost identical (in code) desktop and web apps. If we had 
>> this alone, things like IDE's would become very attractive to 
>> dev's. Write one interface in code and have it usable in whole 
>> bunch of mediums.
>>
>> Because of the web development nature, there is one specific 
>> project I believe to be key to show this off. A CMS. But to do 
>> this effectively we need things like a good router, ORM and 
>> all that type of thing. Not to mention lack of sql based 
>> database support in vibe currently.
>
> The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them.  
> This is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not 
> C++.  I think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better 
> to focus on native GUI apps, especially on mobile.  Vibe.d is a 
> great project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the wider 
> web dev community.
>
> The great thing about D is that it would be a good base for 
> creating completely new tools and technologies.  That is why it 
> is tough to imagine what will bubble up, as it will be up to 
> the imagination of the D programmer.
>
> However, getting D going on mobile might be important, as that 
> seems to be where all the creativity is these days.  Paul 
> Thurrott keeps pointing out that the top two installed Windows 
> apps are Chrome and iTunes, both of which exist to take users 
> away from Windows to other platforms:
>
> http://windowsitpro.com/windows-8/windows-desktop-death
>
> The rest of the top 10 are all "system utilities that include 
> antivirus/malware applications and those silly little tools 
> that make Windows 8 look and work more like Windows 7."  If 
> desktop computers and Windows are dying and mobile is the 
> future, D needs to be on mobile, especially since D will be 
> more efficient and better-suited to mobile constraints.

I disagree with D not having a good chance at web development. 
PHP is a good language for small to medium sites that need to be 
done quickly. But if you need to scale or do anything complex its 
really not a good solution. This is the market I believe D does 
have a chance with especially with Java decline from grace.

As you said about mobile, sure but that would limit to basically 
windows mobile. Once we have ARM support. Android has issues as a 
lot of api is in Java not native. So wrapping with JNI would be 
required which would be bad. With iOS would need extern 
Objective-C support and to get toolchain approved by Apple, which 
I don't see happening anytime soon.

Even if we do disclude app side of things, mobile apps quite 
often have a web service component as well. But thats web 
development essentially.

I'm not expecting D to be bigger than e.g. PHP for example but we 
definitely can be a good alternative.


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