Fantastic exchange from DConf

Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri May 12 05:57:31 PDT 2017


On Friday, May 12, 2017 04:08:52 Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> And I am sure Walter is right about the importance of memory
> safety.  But outside of certain areas D isn't in a battle with
> Rust; memory safety is one more appealing modern feature of D.
> To say it's important to get it right isn't to say it has to
> defeat Rust. Not that you implied this, but some people at dconf
> seemed to implicitly think that way.

I think that we're far past the point that any language is going to beat
everyone else out. Some languages will have higher usage than others, and
it's going to vary quite a lot between different domains. Really, it's more
of a question of whether a lanugage can compete well enough to be relevant
and be used by a lot of developers, not whether it's used by most
developers.

For instance, D and Go are clearly languages that appeal to a vastly
different set of developers, and while they do compete on some level, I
think that they're ultimately just going to be used by very different sets
of people, because they're just too different (e.g. compare Go's complete
lack of generics with D's templates). Rust, on the other hand, seems to have
a greater overlap with D, so there's likely to be greater competition there
(certainly more competetion with regards to replacing C++ in places where
C++ is replaced), but they're still going to appeal to different sets of
developers to an extent, just like C++ and D have a lot of overlap but don't
appeal to the same set of developers. I fully expect that both Rust and D
have bright futures, but I also don't really expect either to become
dominant. That's just too hard for a language to do, especially since older
languages don't really seem to go away. The programming language ecosystem
just becomes more diverse. At most, a language is dominant in a particular
domain, not the software industry as a whole.

I would love for D to become a serious player in the programming language
space such that you see D jobs out there like we currently see C/C++ or Java
jobs out there (right now, as I understand it, even Sociomantic Labs
advertises for C++ programmers, not D programmers). But ultimately, what I
care about is being able to use D when I program and have enough of an
ecosystem around it that there are useful libraries and frameworks that I
can use and build upon, because D is the language that I prefer and want to
program in. Having D destroy C/C++ or Java or C# or Rust or whatever really
isn't necessary for that. It just needs to become big enough that it has a
real presence, whereas right now, it seems more like the folks who use it
professionally are doing so in stealth mode (even if they're not doing so
purposefully). Anyone who wants to get a job somewhere and work in D is
usually going to have a hard time of it right now, even though such jobs do
exist. As it stands, I think a relatively small percentage of D's
contributors are able to use D for their day jobs. And if we can really
change _that_, then we'll have gotten somewhere big, regardless of what
happens with other languages.

- Jonathan M Davis



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list