What are the worst parts of D?

[Don via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 19:07:40 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 10/6/14, 11:55 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 06:13:41PM +0000, Dicebot via 
>> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> On Monday, 6 October 2014 at 16:06:04 UTC, Andrei 
>>> Alexandrescu wrote:
>> [...]
>>>> It would be terrific if Sociomantic would improve its 
>>>> communication
>>>> with the community about their experience with D and their 
>>>> needs
>>>> going forward.
>>>
>>> How about someone starts paying attention to what Don posts? 
>>> That
>>> could be an incredible start. I spend great deal of time both 
>>> reading
>>> this NG (to be aware of what comes next) and writing (to 
>>> express both
>>> personal and Sociomantic concerns) and have literally no idea 
>>> what can
>>> be done to make communication more clear.
>>
>> I don't remember who it was, but I'm pretty sure *somebody* at
>> Sociomantic has stated clearly their request recently: Please 
>> break our
>> code *now*, if it helps to fix language design issues, rather 
>> than
>> later.
>
> More particulars would be definitely welcome. I should add that 
> Sociomantic has an interesting position: it's a 100% D shop so 
> interoperability is not a concern for them, and they did their 
> own GC so GC-related improvements are unlikely to make a large 
> difference for them. So "C++ and GC" is likely not to be high 
> priority for them. -- Andrei

Exactly. C++ support is of no interest at all, and GC is 
something we contribute to, rather than something we expect from 
the community.
Interestingly we don't even care much about libraries, we've done 
everything ourselves.

So what do we care about? Mainly, we care about improving the 
core product.

In general I think that in D we have always suffered from 
spreading ourselves too thin. We've always had a bunch of cool 
new features that don't actually work properly. Always, the focus 
shifts to something else, before the previous feature was 
finished.

At Sociomantic, we've been successful in our industry using only 
the features of D1. We're restricted to using D's features from 
2007!! Feature-wise, practically nothing from the last seven 
years has helped us!

With something like C++ support, it's only going to win companies 
over when it is essentially complete. That means that working on 
it is a huge investment that doesn't start to pay for itself for 
a very long time. So although it's a great goal, with a huge 
potential payoff, I don't think that it should be consuming a 
whole lot of energy right now.

And personally, I doubt that many companies would use D, even if 
with perfect C++ interop, if the toolchain stayed at the current 
level.

As I said in my Dconf 2013 talk -- I advocate a focus on Return 
On Investment.
I'd love to see us chasing the easy wins.