Microsoft to contribute to Clang and LLVM project

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 11 December 2015 at 10:22:18 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I agree that a plan needs to be articulated.  I hoped to get 
> something like that from the vision statement, but broad goals 
> like improving quality or fostering participation are pretty 
> useless.  It should have gone into concrete detail on how they 
> favored accomplishing those broad aims, say by better 
> integrating Panteleev's Digger and other tools into the build 
> process or improving the documentation about getting started on 
> developing D itself.

Well, my main issue with D is that there is no plan for making 
things simpler in order to add more advanced clean features based 
on modern static analysis at the next stage. New features are 
added, like hacking in C++ support or multiple-alias-this, that 
just adds more complexity.

Although I still have some hope that a refactored codebase could 
make "simplification" possible as a side project by an 
independent group. But making a cleaner version of that language 
doesn't seem to be on the map by the core developers. As such, D 
is in the same tarpit as Go. "We are done". Ok, but then these 
languages will remain in a very small niche that most likely will 
shrink, not grow. To me, both Go and D are stuck a little bit in 
the past and I think both languages will need to move one step 
back in order to make a leap forward.

C++14 would have been great if they had bothered to clean up the 
language before adding even more to it. I think C++ is a good 
example of what happens when one doesn't take a step back and 
clean up in time.

> I think you underestimate how much of a selling point dmd's 
> speed is

Even so, the best performing compiler ought be the official one 
and released first.

Go also is acclaimed for great compilation speed, yet people 
complain about execution and say they switch to Rust over it etc. 
And Rust is known to be slow at compilation.

> Personally, I think that entire web platform is stupid, so I 
> don't care that D doesn't target it.

This is the big problem. It is an open target that is available, 
and you only compete with C/C++. Yet it isn't prestige among 
language devs to target it, and it isn't established, so people 
ignore it. In 5 years people will curse because they didn't 
actively target it before other languages got established on it.

If you want to grow that is exactly the kind of target you want. 
People switch if you are the only alternative. That is exactly 
when they switch to smaller niche products.

People adopted Perl, it was the only real alternative for 
prototyping like transforms of text.

People adopted Php, it was the only real alternative for 
embedding code into html.

People thought those application areas were so boring compared to 
"a general purpose language". It was  not "serious" programming 
areas. So these languages owned those domains for many years, and 
grew big.

> Dan recently got the D tests running on the Apple tvOS and 
> watchOS simulators: soon you'll be able to run D on your TV or 
> watch! :)

That's great fun! But it isn't a business-plan with Swift being 
there already.

> Well, right now, D is on far more platforms, so it has a head 
> start, though alpha quality on mobile.  I'm sure Swift will try 
> to compete, but Apple is not going to port it to Android and

I think they are going to make some core libraries available. I 
think that has been announced.

> The first time Apple tried to spur an OSS community with Darwin 
> and their base OSS tools, it never took off, with Apple only 
> providing open-source code dumps ever since.  It's only later

There is a lot demand for an easy path from iOS to Android that 
does not involve hacks like C#. There was actually a Swift 
compiler made by another company for that purpose. But with Apple 
backing this approach it becomes much more attractive.

> Android, and llvm that have built OSS communities.  While Swift 
> has a better chance, since it comes from the llvm group, it 
> will be interesting to see how much outsiders contribute to it.

There are some speculations on whether Apple might want to 
compete with AWS, Google and Microsoft and use Swift as the 
platform. (iCloud)

> You assume that they're very similar and that Swift will have a 
> better ecosystem eventually.  They are _somewhat_ similar but 
> different enough to attract different devs, and I pointed out 
> above why they might not be able to grow their community much 
> larger.

I assume that some people _might_ bother to weed out the 
efficiencies in Swift that are related to staying compatible with 
Objective-C and turn it into a reasonable high level system level 
language for those that don't need that compatibility.

It won't compete directly with Rust or C++, but it might compete 
fiercely with other languages that go the ARC route.