Thoughts from newcommer

[Stefan Koch via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 19:57:19 UTC, Piotr Kowalski wrote:
> Hello D community,
>
> I am language polyglot that lately got interested in D. I love 
> it, it's very elegant language, so simple and so powerful same 
> time. I will write some thoughts as outsider.
>
> The reason I am looking at D in 2017 is that D it's almost 
> nonexistent on popular sites for programmers (reddit/HN etc). 
> The only discussion I remember about D was that it had two 
> standard libraries and there were no consensus on which to use 
> and that it uses GC so it's slow.
>
> In my opinion D can get traction but it needs a lot more 
> marketing and people need to be more vocal about blog posts 
> written about D usage. If you don't have account on Reddit or 
> HackerNews, create one, upvote articles about D, answer 
> questions about D in comments, promote D (without zealotry).
>
> Two other important things to change people minds about D 
> performance:
>
> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
>
> Why D is not there?
>
> https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/previews/round14/#section=data-r14&hw=ph&test=plaintext
>
> This is another very popular benchmark that people discuss and 
> can attract new people to look at D. vibe.d here is not 
> working, it would be good to fix that.
>
> What is the plan for D for next 5 years? What about RAII?
>
> Did you consider implementing solutions from which we could get 
> memory safety without GC in D? Static analysis combined with 
> some additional annotations/rules (but not intrusive).
> For example using some of the solutions from Cyclone[1] or Rust 
> or proposed solutions for lifetimes in C++[2]
>
> [1] 
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/cyclone/papers/cyclone-safety.pdf
>
> [2] 
> https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/docs/Lifetimes%20I%20and%20II%20-%20v0.9.1.pdf

The memory safety is currently in the works.
We just have one std-lib now.
GC is slow, yes.
The short-term solution is to avoid it.
(All gc-ed langauges recommend static preallocation :P)