What are the worst parts of D?

[Manu via Digitalmars-d]

On 08/10/2014 9:20 pm, "Don via Digitalmars-d" <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com>
wrote:
>
> 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.

As someone who previously represented a business interest, I couldn't agree
more.
Aside from my random frustrated outbursts on a very small set of language
issues, the main thing I've been banging on from day 1 is the tooling. Much
has improved, but it's still a long way from 'good'.

Debugging, ldc (for windows), and editor integrations (auto complete,
navigation, refactoring tools) are my impersonal (and hopefully
non-controversial) short list. They trump everything else I've ever
complained about.
The debugging experience is the worst of any language I've used since the
90's, and I would make that top priority.

C++ might have helped us years ago, but I already solved those issues
creatively. Debugging can't be solved without tooling and compiler support.
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