Microsoft to contribute to Clang and LLVM project

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 20:02:27 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 16:17:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> you can optimize for one niche and do extremely well there, 
>> but then you often find yourself stuck in that niche, as Go 
>> finds itself today.
>
> Being stuck in Go's niche would be a fantastic situation for D 
> as Go's market penetration might be 20x that of D. The main 
> limitation for Go is the Go language authors' vision and 
> attitudes. Not really related to the domain.

If it were merely the D team's goal to quickly gain usage like 
Go, such higher market penetration would be fantastic, but I 
don't think that's what they're after.  It seems to be unseating 
C/C++ as the major systems and application programming languages, 
while simultaneously expanding that market upwards into 
higher-level domains C++ can't get into today.

That's a longer game, one you don't rush into.  Will D get there? 
I have no idea, but the recent improvements in C++ imply that new 
AoT-compiled languages like D, Rust, and Go are at least 
pressuring C++ to up its game.  In that sense, the new languages 
can't lose, because even if they go out of use, their best 
features will already have made it into C++.

But I don't think they have to worry about that, as I suspect the 
market for AoT-compiled languages is simply becoming more 
fragmented again, as the scripting languages market has long 
been.  Each of these AoT languages will likely maintain their own 
niche, and C++ has so much legacy baggage- they never talk about 
getting rid of the preprocessor, that's when I'll know they're 
serious- that at least one of them will displace it at the top, 
maybe D. :)