Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[poliklosio via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> * The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential 
> users right off.

Please, elliminate GC.
This also hurts the open source community. Why would I 
write/opensource a high performance library if I know that 
projects like AAA games are not going to use it anyway due to GC 
in D? On the other hand if I can write a library that guarantees 
to not use and not need garbage collector then even C and C++ 
projects can use it.
With GC, D doesn't play nice with existing C/C++ code.

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

Quality is an issue, but I thing a bigger problem for adoption is 
just the time it takes a new user to set the dev environment up. 
If you look at those pages:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Editors
https://wiki.dlang.org/IDEs
most of the tools use dcd, dscanner and dfmt to provide the most 
important features like auto-completion, autoformatting etc.
The problem is that dcd, dscanner and dfmt are not bundled 
together so it takes a long time to actually install all this 
together. Note that discovering what is what also takes a lot of 
time for a new user.
I tried to do this recently and it took me 2 days before I found 
a combination of versions of dcd, dscanner, dfmt, dub and an IDE 
that work together correctly on Windows. My example is probably 
extreme but is a lesson.

May I suggest bundling the official tools with dcd, dscanner, 
dfmt and dub to create a Dlang-SDK.

Then the user would only have to install
- Dlang-SDK
- An editor
And everything would work. This would reduce the time from a few 
hours (with a very large variance) to 30 minutes. Then maybe 
people who try D in their free time without being strongly 
indoctrinated by Andrei will not quit after 30 minutes. :)