Lost a new commercial user this week :(

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 21 December 2014 at 03:12, Martin Nowak via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On 12/17/2014 09:45 AM, Manu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>
>> Well... when? I've been here 6 years. When can I start to use D for my
>> work?
>> Other languages seem to have a higher velocity. Are we fighting a losing
>> battle?
>
>
> Other languages do much less than D which is a full-blown C++ replacement.
> We've made huge progress in the past few years, look at the number of
> bugfixes and enhancements http://dlang.org/changelog.html and we introduced
> or finished several language features, that make D even more powerful (e.g.
> UFCS, UDA, alias this...). Still only very few people actually work on the
> compiler and we're also pretty bad in coordinating contributions.

I totally appreciate all this. My feeling today is that the language
is more-or-less fine. Sure there are a few areas of development where
I have an interest or some stake in, but at this point, I've come to
consider all further language development to have a significantly
lower importance than the overall experience as presented to users.
Tooling and ecosystem is the biggest hurdle to launch D to "a million
users" right now.

Where is libdlang? We need to have the front-end proper available as a
library for parsing/syntax hilighting/refactoring, etc. People are
frequently re-inventing d language parsers, and they're getting
better... but they only work properly 'most of the time'. The work
distracts from the actual goal of those projects though, which is to
provide quality tooling inside IDE's.
There should be a standard go-to for performing this work, and common
sense suggests that it would share code with the frontend. libclang
exists, and everyone's using it these days with great results.

I would make libdlang top priority. Or perhaps one notch below the
ongoing GC related work.
I strongly feel it should be owned by the compiler team though, since
they are the ones that know how to parse the language correctly, and
already maintain the most comprehensive code for parsing D that we
have; DMD.