Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[David via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 00:19:27 UTC, Brad Roberts wrote:
> On 6/6/2016 2:16 AM, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On 6/6/2016 1:15 AM, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>>> * Safety has holes and bugs.
>>>
>>> Then so does C, C++ and Rust, so this is just a comment made 
>>> because it
>>> can be made and sounds bad. Bad enough to salve the 
>>> conscience of the
>>> speaker as to why they are not already using D.
>>
>> It's pretty clear when they say that, and then continue using 
>> C++ which
>> has no safety, that safety isn't the real reason.
>
> This isn't a small problem, don't dismiss it quite that 
> quickly.  Safety as a usable subset of D is still pretty 
> non-existent and yet is used as a selling point.  The language 
> still has holes -- I don't have bug report numbers, but others 
> have reported them in the past, some closed some not.  At the 
> library level things are far worse.  I've yet to be able to 
> write any interesting apps with an @safe main.
>
> Has anyone?
>
> Later,
> Brad

My two cents on what I've read so far (in my week long pursuit of 
learning this language), is that D's safety system is the same 
old "C++" style philosophy in disguise. Sure if you follow all of 
the paradigms and code in an idiomatic way, you will have less 
bugs. But my experience is people do things less idiomatic and 
more idiotic.

In short, D has an opt in system. Which means it's EXTREMELY easy 
to opt out. Which is essentially what C++ has to. You can have a 
moderate amount of memory safety if you still to smart pointers 
and stray away from manual memory management (sure you have some 
things to worry about, such as cross referencing, etc), but 
forging a pointer is so easy. And even worse...so convenient at 
times.

Languages like Go, C# and Java are far better in this regard 
because you have to go WAAAAY out of your way to start doing 
silly things. You can. And you can by accident (C# has delegates 
that lead to a lot of leaks for instance), but in general the 
situation is better.

D has the features...but they are opt in. Which means people 
aren't gonna go out of there way. Just like in C++. Just an 
observation.

In other news if I had to guess I'd say @safe never was meant to 
be slapped on main, but to help give you reasonable guarantees of 
where issues are not. However, @unsafe would have probably been 
better (so you'd have to opt into the unsafeness) because that is 
greppable.

In terms of safety, I don't see how D is any different than C++. 
Which is why Rust is probably going to be the tool people reach 
for safety. But only have reaching for Go, C# and Java, because 
they require so much less of a learning curve.