Where will D sit in the web service space?

via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Jul 13 00:11:34 PDT 2015


On Sunday, 12 July 2015 at 19:02:23 UTC, Brad Anderson wrote:
> I'd consider D a failure if it couldn't fill both of these 
> roles. D is a general purpose systems programming language. It 
> doesn't and shouldn't care about what you are using it for. 
> There is plenty of overlap in what you need for high 
> performance web backends and high performance gamedev.

Here's the deal: there is no such thing as a general purpose 
(system) language in the empirical sense. We might have been lead 
to believe that C or C++ were general purpose, but that only 
happend because there were no visible viable alternatives. C is 
more and more becoming a kernel/embedded language, C++ is more 
and more becoming a legacy/niche language. C++ is only a game dev 
language after you add various extensions (e.g. simd). It is only 
a number-crunching language after you add some other extensions. 
So you need a direction in the feature set towards an application 
area.

When you get new languages that cut down on development time 
(like Rust and Go) the C/C++ application domain will leak over to 
those niches based on the desired feature set. But the feature 
set needs to be complete for that application area (e.g. GC with 
the right characteristics, inlining/simd, GPU programming etc).

D needs to complete the feature set for some sizeable domain in 
order to compete in this emerging market of "many languages" 
(thanks to LLVM).


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