Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Andre Pany via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its 
> own thread. It's very important.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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.

Hi,

to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
in my opinion D lacks std.decimal. Maybe some companies will 
develop their
own decimal libraries but for the others they won't.
There is some great work, but currently it seems to be blocked by 
std.bigint
https://github.com/andersonpd/eris/issues/6

For the tooling I can only speak for windows environment. To have 
a sophisticated
IDE, the DLL topic needs some love. DLL are a major topic on 
windows and without
sophisticated DLL support, it is hardly possible to build an 
integrated IDE similar
to the well known like Visual Studio/Delphi/...
One major issue I faced, I create a class in a DLL and cannot 
cast the class
in my main application to another type due to the missing type 
info.
The workaround would be to have massive code duplication, which 
makes the code more complex.
Also here some great work are already done but blocked by the 
"export semantic" topic.

Kind regards
André