How D could gain more traction?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 15 April 2015 at 15:36:44 UTC, XavierAP wrote:
> That looks like good architecture. I'm not sure if 2 and 3 
> wouldn't be at the same level of (non-) dependency? Or maybe 
> it's the image processing example you've used. In any case 2 
> would have more priority because of practical reasons 
> (necessity for a real-world standard library, and core-ness) 
> and lack of 3rd-party alternatives.

I am not sure either, one will have to map out a graph with 
concrete examples to get it right.

But for instance in Python the problem is that the type system 
isn't "conceptual" so a library like numpy provides separate 
types for arrays of numbers etc. You don't replace "an interface 
abstraction" with an "optimized implementation" which would be 
the ideal high level thing to do. I think a system level language 
will suffer a similar faith, because fast image processing 
depends on OpenCL or SSE or Metal (iOS) that could affect the 
API/memory handling.

Desktop and unix-servers are fairly stable "architectures" due to 
the cost of reimplementation/installed base, but GPU/CPU 
integration is new. Mobile less stable since they are more like 
"fashion items" and being "new" is a selling point. Cloud is too 
heterogenous. Embedded is very much in flux (SoC etc). But even 
on the desktop/server how you handle network traffic has changed 
over the past few decades (despite no big changes in the 
networking protocols).

Image processing is also a hard nut to crack. Think just about 
height fields in 3D. Satellite images with N layer of high 
resolution or too large to fit in memory etc. Then you have run 
length encoding...