Blocking points for further D adoption

[Seb via Digitalmars-d]

>I don't see it the same way. Yes, I agree my opinion is not 
>representative. I'd also say I'm glad I can do something about 
>this.

Moved Andrei's post 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/nipb14$ldb$1@digitalmars.com) to a 
new thread.

>> [...]
>>> Meanwhile, I go to conferences. Train and consult at large 
>>> companies.
>>> Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk 
>>> about D
>>> and ask people what it would take for them to use the 
>>> language.
>>> Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:
>>> [..]

>>> * Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the
>>> competition.
>>
>> And what have we done about it? How long has it been since 
>> dfix existed,
>> yet we still haven't really integrated it into the dmd 
>> toolchain?
>
>I've spoken to Brian about it. Dfix does not do lookup, which 
>makes it sadly not up for meaningful uses.

How about we start calling dfix and dscanner "official", move 
them over to the Dlang github namespace and ship them with every 
release?

>>> * Hiring people who know D is a problem.
>>
>> There are many willing candidates right here. :-P
>
>Nice.

We should start to list companies that use D - that solves the 
chicken vs. egg problem too:
https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/pull/1312

>>> * Documentation and tutorials are weak.
>>
>> And what have we done about this?
>
>http://tour.dlang.org is a good start.

Yes it is good step, but we need to improve this and create more!
Having a MOOC (usually >50K viewers!) would be the best way to 
move forward.

>>> * There's no web services framework (by this time many folks 
>>> know of
>>> D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of 
>>> vibe.d).
>>> I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd 
>>> over one
>>> year ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough 
>>> interest.
>>

I heard this a lot too.
"You don't have a web server in your standard libary?? It's 2016!"
We should close the gap to NodeJS, Go (and all the other 
languages) ASAP and standardize the API for the following:

1) event loop library (e.g. https://github.com/etcimon/libasync)
2) bare-metal http server with full HTTP2 support (e.g. 
https://github.com/etcimon/libhttp2)

NodeJS provides such a low-level API and this has been a key part 
of their success,
because so many libraries built on-top of this without breaking 
each other.

https://nodejs.org/api/http.html

>> What about linking to it in a prominent place on dlang.org?  
>> This isn't
>> a big problem, AFAICT.  I don't think it takes months and 
>> years to put
>> up a big prominent banner promoting vibe.d on, say, the 
>> download page of
>> dlang.org.
>
>PR please. I can't babysit everything. I'm preparing for a 
>conference where I'll evangelize for D next week 
>(http://ndcoslo.com/speaker/andrei-alexandrescu/). As I 
>mentioned at DConf, for better or worse this is the kind of 
>stuff I cannot delegate.

That could help, but it's needs more work:
https://github.com/dlang/dlang.org/pull/1314