Using D

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 11 July 2014 at 19:00:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Friday, 11 July 2014 at 15:42:04 UTC, simendsjo wrote:
>> On 07/11/2014 05:30 PM, Chris wrote:
>> (...)
>>> Believe me, D's supposed sluggishness as regards GC is
>>> not so important for most applications. I dare say 90% of all
>>> applications are fine with the current GC.
>> (...)
>>
>> I agree with this. The bottlenecks i my applications are MySQL 
>> and
>> Microsoft Office (Excel, Powerpoint, or even just plain COM). 
>> The same
>> bottlenecks as I get when using C#. Of course, it depends a 
>> lot on what
>> you do, but for my use (and yours, and probably many others), 
>> the GC
>> performance is something you can probably safely ignore.
>
> Ah, but that's because you're comparing it to C#, not languages 
> that don't use GC.  The big problem for D is that the market 
> for programming languages has bifurcated since D was created, 
> with the performant native-compiled languages like C/C++/Obj-C 
> on one side and the much larger market for easier to use but 
> much less performant, what used to be called "scripting," 
> languages like ruby/python/java on the other.  Trying to be a 
> better C++, by borrowing some ease of use features like GC or 
> reflection from the scripting languages, leaves D stuck in the 
> middle right now, neither here nor there.
>
> Who still uses native-compiled languages?  
> Performance-sensitive games, server applications that squeeze 
> out performance, like number-crunching or search engines, and 
> desktop apps that need the performance, that's about it.  
> Everything else has either gone to the web with a scripting 
> language backend or mobile.  I hear that even enterprise LOB 
> desktop apps are mostly written in Java/C# these days, because 
> they just don't need the speed of a native language and can 
> crank the code out quicker that way.
>
> However, mobile could be D's saving grace, as native 
> development is back on iOS and even Android is moving to 
> Ahead-Of-Time compiling with the next release.  Too bad D 
> doesn't work on mobile, even though some of us are working on 
> getting it there.

I agree. This is a big pain for me too.


> D should focus on the native end of the market, by trying to be 
> the easier way to get most of the performance.  You're not 
> going to get the scripting guys now, because native is just too 
> hard for them.  If D can assert itself in that smaller niche of 
> native languages, it might have enough juice to go after the 
> other end later.  I don't think either happens without a 
> commercial implementation, community development doesn't cut 
> it.  Linux didn't take off till long after it got commercial 
> vendors on board, the same will be true here.
>
> I don't mean to be pessimistic about D's goal of being usable 
> by all, from scripting to systems, as D may actually be good 
> enough to get there one day.  I just think you're not going to 
> get there without focusing on taking over a niche at a time, 
> particularly the niche best suited to D right now, mobile.

A niche for a general purpose language?