D future ...

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Tue, 2017-02-14 at 10:22 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-
d wrote:
> On Saturday, 11 February 2017 at 18:51:31 UTC, Russel Winder 
> wrote:
> > Interesting, but the current competition is between Go, Rust, 
> > C++, and D.
> 
> I don't know, which fields are you thinking about? I believe the 
> market is changing.

It is also "re-tribalising" around the Rust, Go, Swift, C++17 for
native code; Java 8/9, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, Clojure on the JVM;
ECMAScript, TypeScript, Elm in the browser, and Python in data science
and such like. OK not orthogonal dimensions.

> On OSX/iOS: Swift + Metal is the alternative, throw in some bits 
> of Objective-C/C++ where you have long running tight inner loops.
> 
> On Windows: moving away from C# sounds very risky.
> 
> On Linux: this is more of an open space.
> 
> Embedded: C/C++, maybe Rust for those with courage? I suspect 
> moving out of vendor supported tooling is risky (e.g. 
> system-on-a-chip solutions)
> 
> Numerics: Python + low level libraries, Matlab etc.
> 
> But, the way I see it TypeScript + "native libraries" has the 
> potential for covering a lot of ground. The eco system is 
> exploding.

An interesting perspective is who is putting money into IDEs and
JetBrains are a good measuring device for this. C/C++ with CMake got
CLion which is now getting a lot of Swift and Rust love. Go got a whole
new IDE in Goglang. C#, Ruby, JavaScript get a lot of push, as do the
gamut of JVM languages in IDEA – where the Rust plugin gets a lot of
push. Python has PyCharm.

D has some small effort in IDEA, but it needs the resourcing to get to
the level the Rust, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Swift, Go, C++, Kotlin
languages get.

It is noticeably that many people are leaving the Eclipse environment
for the JetBrains one, Ceylon is a prime example. But Eclipse remains a
player here (unlike NetBeans?)

Emacs, VIM, SublimeText, Atom, etc. get some love but few people really
care about them compared to the Eclipse and JetBrains IDEs.

So if we measure traction by IDE and editor effort D is losing, along
with Fantom, Crystal, Pony, Nim, and all the other languages that focus
on the language to the expense of the way people use the language.
Kingsley started work on the IDEA plugin and Bruno on the Eclipse
plugin. Some people are working on the IDEA plugin (I am supposed to be
as well, but I am failing). To get D out there with traction, these,
not the compiler, should be the core focus of attention – the place
where lots of resource is going in. Ceylon, Kotlin, Rust, Go have some
core resource that attracts more resource, and there is a snowball
effect.

No matter how good D and the compilers are, without high quality IDE
support, it will be a peripheral language for the core adherents.

But we have been round this time and again, with extraordinarily little
progress.


-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder
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