Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Mon, 2016-06-06 at 06:50 +0000, poliklosio via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
> […]

> Please, elliminate GC.

Let's not. It is a USP against C++ and Rust. It forges a new route to
traction, cf. Go, Java, etc.

> 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.

There may be some instances where this is the case. Let them use C++ or
Rust. Fine. If AAA games people want C++ they will use C++, for D they
are a lost market. That is fine, there is nothing wrong with that. See
what happened with Go.

And anyway D has a GC if you want and a no-GC if you want. Thus this is
not actually an issue anyway.

> 
> > * 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.

Agreed. the editor, support, toolchain thing is an issue. Whilst some
of us can cope with putting the bits together, this is not a route to
traction for the language.

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

Having a small selection of "all in" bundles is a good idea. Better is
a tool for creating an installation from the bits.
 
> 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. :)

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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