Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Jun 7 07:35:51 PDT 2016


On Tuesday, 7 June 2016 at 14:16:03 UTC, Chris wrote:
> It's not like 20 years + Apple or Google behind it. Given how 
> slowly big languages like Java have progressed over the years, 
> one can only admire the wealth of (sometimes innovative) 
> features D has, implemented by a small number of core 
> developers.

The problem with that reasoning is that the standard libraries of 
languages like C++, Java and Python are less likely to contain 
undocumented bugs. Which is more important than features.

The sole purpose of a standard library is to have something very 
stable to build your own libraries upon. A large number of 
features in a standard library is not really a selling point for 
production work.

Having a large number of independent narrow high quality 
maintained 3rd party libraries is a selling point. The role of a 
good standard library is to enable writing narrow independent 
libraries that can be combined.

This is an area where many languages go wrong. Basically, if 
there is no significant demand for a feature from library authors 
then it probably should not be added to a standard library.

Arcane bloat becomes baggage down the line and can even keep the 
language itself from evolving. (breaking your own standard 
library is much worse than breaking 3rd party frameworks)



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