Red Hat's issues in considering the D language

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, December 21, 2016 18:49:43 Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> Am Wed, 21 Dec 2016 08:18:48 -0500
>
> schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>:
> > On 12/20/16 6:08 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> > > Hello, a few engineers at Red Hat are taking a look at using the D
> > > language on the desktop and have reached out to us. They have
> > > created a list of issues. We are on the top-level ones, and of
> > > course would appreciate any community help as well.
> > >
> > > https://gist.github.com/ximion/77dda83a9926f892c9a4fa0074d6bf2b
> >
> > An engineer from Debian wrote down what's needed on the distribution
> > side to give a green light to the D language:
> >
> > https://gist.github.com/ximion/fe6264481319dd94c8308b1ea4e8207a
> >
> >
> > Andrei
>
> "GDC does not support creating shared libraries at time, which is a big
> deal for distros which need it to reduce duplicate code and make
> security fixes easier."
>
> You can cross that one off the list.
>
> "GDC only supports an ancient version of the D standard library, which
> has many nice classes and also bugfixes missing."
>
> We're at 2.068.2 now. Still old, but good enough to run the latest
> vibe.D release.

Well, that's quite old at this point, and many programs will not build with
it. vibe.d is a bit abnormal in that it tries to compile with several
releases, whereas most projects tend to just use the latest. So, I think
that the complaint that "GDC only supports an ancient version of the D
standard library" is completely justified. At this point, if you want to
compile with GDC, you pretty much need to target it and/or version portions
of your code for different compilers or different compiler/library versions
(which is what the vibe.d guys go to the extra effort of doing but very few
D developers do). I fully expect that GDC will eventually catch up, but
unfortunately, until it does, for many projects, it's useless. And I'd
honestly recommend to people to avoid it until it does catch up, since
otherwise, they're just going to run into compatability problems, and when
they ask questions on SO or in the forums about what does or doesn't work,
they're going to have problems due to differences in what does and doesn't
work with GDC vs dmd and ldc.

- Jonathan M Davis