Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Sun Jun 5 19:20:52 PDT 2016


Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its own thread. It's 
very important.
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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:

* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right off.

* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.

* Safety has holes and bugs.

* Hiring people who know D is a problem.

* Documentation and tutorials are weak.

* 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.

* (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio plugin, it doesn't 
exist.

* Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.

* Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the weaknesses above.



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