Where will D sit in the web service space?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 22 July 2015 at 21:38:14 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> The finance guys seem to be coming on board, the Dconf '15 talk 
> by the fund guy, Smith, probably helps.  I thought this was a 
> nice endorsement recently, a reddit comment by a high-frequency 
> trader which ended with:
>
> "[W]e've loved D so much that we're in the middle of a full 
> rewrite from C++11 to D. The productivity boost is absolutely 
> worth it."
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3cg1r0/lessons_learned_writing_a_filesystem_in_d/csvyxn8

But it doesn't say why. Did they evaluate Rust too?

Granted, everyone can find several very good reasons to dislike 
C++, so any reasonable language that can replace it can be said 
to have an advantage if that dislike is present on a C++ team...

But as far as C/C++ replacement languages go, there are several 
focusing on being more suitable than C++ for specific niches: 
Rust, Go, Chapel, Vala…

The more generic ones like D, Loci, etc appears to be less used. 
I assume the lack of a specific edge over C++ matters.

> And as I've said before, focusing on a domain means you 
> optimize for it, which inevitably means you become less general.

Not really, you just focus your effort at making it work really 
well for a particular domain. Like C++ with extensions for a 
specific purpose.

> Php has proven to be highly optimized for the web programming 
> domain, in that it is highly successful at being chosen for 
> many web projects, but almost nobody would want to use it for 
> anything else, for a variety of reasons, but mainly that the 
> qualities that make it successful on the web hurt it in other 
> domains.

Well, Php is quite horrible for web programming too, but they 
gained traction for many of the same reasons perl did:

- It was easy to get started with when you needed 10-50 lines of 
scripting in 500 lines of HTML.

- Provided library interfaces that was similar to 
Unix/C-libraries (really awful, but easy to get started)

- Early adopters, there was no real competition outside perl

- It got "bundled" with web-servers one way or the other.

> languages.  Even if the pendulum doesn't swing all the way back 
> as far as we think it will for general-purpose native 
> languages, that's a very large niche, one with few choices- C, 
> C++, D, Rust, Go (the first two legacy)- and well worth 
> competing in.

But I think Rust and Go are focusing on specific domains. I think 
people pick languages now looking for specific characteristics 
that match their domain. I think the overlap between Rust and Go 
is rather small.

> roaring past D.  If your only point is that it's done better 
> than it has a right to because it has a very specific strength,

I'd say that Erlang captured a market despite shortcoming because 
it was the only easy-way-out. And you probably could say that 
about PhP too.