Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

Satoshi via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Mon Jun 6 12:44:12 PDT 2016


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.


(I'm work as a C/C++ programmer for military sector in the area 
of the information and communication infrastructure and 
electronic warfare)

When I told of D to my boss he had a couple of reasons why not to 
use D for development of our products.

* Backward compatibility with existing code.
* D is much more complex than C++
* Not enough tutorials and solved problems in D on stack overflow 
(LOL)
* We have problem to recruit a good C++ not a good D programmer. 
(1/100 is good)
* My boss does not have free time to learn new things...
* Using GC is strictly prohibited in realtime apps. And D does 
not have an compiler supported ARC
* D without GC or ARC is not powerful as it can be.
* More and more people are dumber, we must write our programs for 
later re-usage by any junior what we must employ. C++ is in this 
way much more easier than D, cuz you know what every line of your 
program do. Employ C++ junior programmer and let him to learn D 
and then work on our projects is not a good (and cost-effective) 
idea.
* Not everyone is interested in programming, sometimes people are 
doing it just for money.


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list