What are the worst parts of D?

yawniek via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sat Oct 11 03:40:47 PDT 2014


> 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.

disclaimer: i am rather new to D and thus have a bit of a distant 
view.

i think the above touches an important point. One thing GO does 
right is that they focused on feature rich stdlib/library 
ecosystem even though the language was very young. i'm coming 
from Ruby/Python and the reason i use those languages is that 
they have two things:
a) they are fun to use (as andrei said in the floss interview: 
the creators had "taste").
b) huge set of libs that help me to get stuff done.

now i think a) is fine, but with b) i am not sure if the strategy 
to get full C/C++ interop will not take too long and scare those 
people off that are not coming from C/C++.

i think D is a fantastic tool to write expressive, fast and 
readable code. I don't need much more language features (again, 
look at GO...) but a solid foundation of libs to gain 
"competitive advantage" in my daily work.



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