C++17

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 09:00:17 UTC, rsw0x wrote:
> On Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 08:56:09 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 08:08:30 UTC, Tobias Müller 
>> wrote:
>>> H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>> [long rant]
>>>
>>> If you want to attract new programmers you should stop 
>>> constantly bashing other programming languages on the public 
>>> forums.
>>>
>>> This is one thing that Rust got right.
>>
>> Well, C++ hash tables are ok. It is the result of a C++ 
>> library philosophy, which one may or may not agree with.
>>
>> The point of this thread was to argue that D needs to attract 
>> C/C++ programmers and might be better off selecting semantics 
>> that attract them. There is something to be said about 
>> timeliness for doing so.
>>
>> Autumn 2016 seems to be the perfect time to market D to C++ 
>> programmers, but the first thing they will ask for is no-GC 
>> memory handling, and "malloc" + DIY will just result in a big 
>> big yawn.
>>
>> If 8 weekend programmers can replace 1 full time programmer 
>> and D needs 5 more full time programmers to compete (with C++, 
>> Rust and Swift), then D needs 40 weekend programmers to 
>> compete.
>>
>> It takes a focused _strategy_ to get into the hearts of C/C++ 
>> programmers. It's not going to happen on it's own.
>
> The response from the D community seems to be an overwhelming 
> "It's fine as is" when it's obviously not. Which is making me 
> question sinking more time into D if there actually is no 
> cohesive plan to make D an actual C++ competitor rather than a 
> toy language as it currently stands.

Grumbling is great, up to a point.  Talented and discerning 
people who don't see a way to fix problems are going to grumble.

Change takes time, and one tends to overestimate what can be 
accomplished in shorter periods of time, and underestimate what's 
possible over longer periods.  Since I've been here (one or two 
years) we've seen some very substantial improvements - the web 
site, the documentation, C++ integration, D being usable on 
ARM/Android, just to name a few.

But the power is in your hands too.  Perhaps the D Foundation and 
corporate sponsorship will change the resource question in time.  
But it's a different situation from being in a vast corporation 
where one has no control and nobody will listen to you.  Ilya saw 
that D needed better numerical primitives and he wrote ndslice.  
John Colvin saw that D needed a focal point for numerical and 
scientific computing and he took charge of that - nobody 
appointed him.

There isn't so much benefit to having a coherent top-down plan 
when you can neither force people to work on things, nor pay them 
to do so.  That's not how open-source works, and it's more 
governed by the principle of catallaxy discussed by Hayek than it 
is some kind of corporate project.  The advantage of not having a 
top down plan is that decisions can be shaped by local knowledge 
from peoples' practical experience of the kinds of problems they 
need to solve.

If you want to change the GC etc, telling other people they ought 
to look at that will be much less effective than picking some 
aspect of the problem to work on.  For example, the sociomantic 
GC was released - I wonder what the blockers are for this to be 
ported in part or whole to D.

If one doesn't have time to work on the whole thing, one can at 
least start creating a focal point for a white paper and then let 
others add to it and refine it.