Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 09:49:34 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> std::unique_ptr and std::shared_ptr maybe great for those who 
> have to use C++, but for those with a choice it is the fastest 
> route to Rust. And then you find Rust cannot cope nicely with 
> many C libraries. Hence you find your way to D. Only to find to 
> developer environments nowhere near as good.

Well, currently C++17 has overall better semantics than Rust and 
D, for system level programming.

It is just a very expensive language to become and remain 
proficient in, and C++ syntax issues means you have to spend more 
effort on making your code maintainable... :-/

Both Rust and D have syntax and semantic issues, if they had 
focused on improving the ergonomics instead of adding features 
then they could take on C++. As it stands, they cannot.

So yes, and top notch editor is needed to gain ground, but isn't 
sufficient as of today.


> For a traditional Emacs person, I am finding CLion a joy to 
> use. D needs equivalents.

Good static typing based editors matter _a  lot_. My own 
experience is that PyCharm makes it harder to justify using a 
statically typed language over Python. So Python benefits 
enormously from PyCharm being available in a community edition.

It is quite interesting that editors can add missing language 
features like that and turn dynamic languages into gradually 
typed languages (more or less).