Blocking points for further D adoption

[Artem Tarasov via Digitalmars-d]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 9:35 AM, Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d <
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:


> PyD is not a recent project.  Nor is LuaD.  Or bachmeier's work on R
> integration.
>

I've learned about the last one only from this thread, and the first two
are listed only on http://wiki.dlang.org/Scripting_Libraries, thus I draw
the conclusion that's how they are used most often.


> PyD is only barely alive
>>
> Really?  You have submitted pull requests and nobody has looked at them ?
> Seemed alive enough to me when I looked a few months back.  It's normal
> activity diminishes as a project reaches maturity.


You are right in that it's well maintained. I say 'barely' because for such
kind of project I'd expect to see at least one user per each platform
(Linux/OS X/Win), and I couldn't find that many. I ran a global search 'pyd
std.range' on Github to get an idea of usage, and the outcome was rather
disappointing for a mature project. I'm not a Win user so I can't help on
this one.


> What a great opportunity to give something back!  Why not sketch out a
> vision for what this should look like, as John has done with dlangscience.


I'm afraid vision is also not going to help a lot, but here you go:

- LDC starts to provide libphobos2.a compiled with -fPIC
- PyD:
1) Links druntime dynamically and Phobos statically (with -Bsymbolic to
avoid symbol clashes between different Phobos versions)
2) Prepares a tiny libdruntime.so wrapper as a Python package, such that
'import druntime' in Python code initializes D runtime; all PyD packages
start to use this import.
3) Someone should help to sort out multithreading-related gotchas, if any
crop up
- D Language Foundation registers an official account on PyPI and publishes
the aforementioned package
- Finally, someone makes a useful PyD-based extension, publishes it, makes
sure his colleagues can use it with a single `pip install`, and puts a link
to reddit/hackernews


> Yes it has a unique advantage.  But it isn't realistic to expect others to
> do the work for you at this stage in the development of the ecosystem...


Well, it's not for me, I'm mostly out already, back to C++14/Python, after
careful weighing of offerings w.r.t. infrastructure/pain of coding. The
ideal people for these kind of tasks are students, imho. I've read on this
forum about some magic place where D is being taught at a university,
that's where I'd try to get an influx from.
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