More Linux love?

Dawid Ciężarkiewicz" <dpc at ucore.info> Dawid Ciężarkiewicz" <dpc at ucore.info>
Sat Jun 15 20:25:18 PDT 2013


Hi,

I've been following D development for quite a bit of years now 
and it have always been the case that Linux was a second (or even 
third) class citizen in D-Lang world.

I've always wondered when D is going to mature and gain more 
popularity and always attributed the problems with D catching up 
mostly for two things:

* that it's was essentially developed by one man only;
* that it neglected Linux;

The first issue have changed some while ago, and I was very happy 
to hear that finally Walter somewhat embraced more distributed 
and open development model. "D on github? Hell must have frozen 
over." -- I thought. And I think everyone could quickly see the 
results. Each of the latest releases seem like a big leap 
forward, not just small set improvements.

But the later seems to be the same as it was. Yeah, DMD can 
generate x86_64 nowadays which I remember was a long time pending 
issue some while back and I can find `gdc` in the Ubuntu 
repository, which is huge improvement, but overall the impression 
is the same: D is Windows-centric.

It seems to me that because historically D was Windows-centric, 
because Walter is Windows user, for all this years Windows 
developers had easier time when playing with D, than Linux devs. 
And after all this years, D community is mostly Windows-centric. 
Have anyone did any poll regarding this? I am guessing, I may be 
wrong.

Each time I fell the urge to play with D in the free time and 
want to test newest, coolest features and projects written in D, 
I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library 
incompatibilities, path incompatibilities. I toy with a lot of 
languages and I never hit issues like this with eg. Rust or Go, 
which fall into similar category of programming languages. Both 
of them seem to be developed for Linux/Unix - first, Windows 
later.

So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers: please 
install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe Fedora too 
and see for yourself is your project is easy to install and 
working each time you release it.

In my opinion in the last 15 years most of the noticeable, long 
lasting programming software improvements came from Linux/Mac 
world (Unix, generally speaking), but I am biased. But the fact 
is: Open Source and Linux is where young, eager to learn and risk 
devs and cool kids are. In great numbers. Embrace them, just like 
Open, Collaborative development model and you'll quickly see a 
lot of new cool projects, developers, bug fixes and buzz. :)

PS. Kudos for whole D community, the language is even better and 
more impressive then it used to be.


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