My two cents

[EntangledQuanta]

On Wednesday, 18 October 2017 at 08:56:21 UTC, Satoshi wrote:
> Hi,
> I had been using D for almost 6 years and I want to share my 
> opinion with you.
> I don't want to blame anyone but I'll focus more on bad things 
> and possible improvements.
> And this is just how I see D from my perspective.
> (Sorry for my English, I'm too lazy to take the lessons).
>
>
> First, D started as a great new language with the best from all 
> languages. But now D seems more and more conservative. New 
> syntactic sugars aren't added just because they can be found in 
> phobos. (this was Walter's answer when I asked for maybe monad 
> syntactic sugar).
>
> OK, what I'm missing in D and what I think is wrong?
>
> syntactic sugar for:
> tuples
> maybe monad (why we cannot have same syntax as in C#?)
> conditional dereferencing and stuff about that (same as in C#)
> foo?.bar;
> foo?[bar];
> return foo ?? null;
>
> async/await (vibe.d is nice but useless in comparison to C# or 
> js async/await idiom)
> I want to create function returning Promise/Task and await 
> where I want to.
> e.g.
> auto result = device.start(foo, bar); // This is RPC to remote 
> server returning Task!Bar
> // do some important stuff
> return await result; // wait for RPC finish, then return it's 
> result
>
> I want to do this and not any ugly workaround about that.
>
>
> @trusted, @safe, @system - why we have 3 keywords instead of 
> one? And why it's so complicated to use?
>
> First, we should have one 'unsafe' keyword.
> Second, everything should be safe by default.
> 3rd, if we want to declare @system func, use 'void foo() 
> unsafe;'
> if we want to declare @trusted func, use
> void foo() {
> unsafe {
>
> }
> }
>
> This fulfills the D's idiom in better way, because we should be 
> defining unsafe sections as small as possible.
>
>
> C# properties instead of existing ones.
> function and property should be two different things.
> Calling function without () or assigning to it by = is a ugly 
> behavior and should be avoided.
>
> implement this thing from C# (just because it's cool)
> new Foo() {
>   property1 = 42,
>   property2 = "bar"
> };
>
>
> Reference counting when we cannot use GC...
>
>
> Commercial usage, shared libraries and stuff
> There isn't any handy tool to download, manage and publish 
> closed source stuff.
> dub is great for simple solutions but useless in big projects 
> with multiple targets, configurations, etc.
> Everything is primary focused on opensource development (but 
> everyone here wants to see D as a next successor of C++ in 
> commercial sphere).
>
>
> Still cannot easily develop closed source dlls on Windows. On 
> Linux every symbol is public by default, but on Windows not so 
> it's needed to export them manually.
>
>
> Unable to publish closed source library without workaround and 
> ugly PIMPL design.
>
> Add dll/so usage without header files
> (export enums, templates and stuff right into dll/so and let D 
> compiler to import these stuff from it)
>
>
>
> For me, it seems like Walter is solving edge case problems like 
> return ref parameters and return functions but is unable to add 
> some basic stuff.
>
>

These guys are old now and don't have the drive they used to 
have. It happens, part of life. Unfortunately they do not realize 
this and do not want to pass the torch. I wouldn't expect 
anything major for D any more unless something significant 
changes in the management. D is stagnate, unfortunately and will 
almost surely never be a major player. It's unfortunate but D has 
a lot of problems. It is not commercially viable for the mass 
market. D is a hobby language and will remain that way for the 
majority of it's users. This is almost entirely due to the mind 
set you have. It's a lot of work to bring D up to par with the 
other languages and there seems very little interest in actually 
making that happen.

Walter only see's what he wants. He looks at D and does not see 
the flaws like  mother looking at her ugly baby. If one always 
looks at the pros and ignores the cons then anything looks good. 
D has a lot of great things but also a lot of bad things... until 
those bad things are fixed D won't go anywhere... it would be 
nice, at least, if the management would be objective about the 
bad things instead of sweeping them under the rug.  Faking it 
until you make it is not an option here.