Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Pjotr Prins]

On Sunday, 26 August 2018 at 03:17:06 UTC, Ali wrote:
> As a realistic short term fix, I think both Andrei and Walter, 
> need to streamline and be more vocal about long term plans, 
> because this is obviously a source of confusion for many, and a 
> source for a lot of rants

My summary is that D means different things to different people. 
D has put in the kitchen sink. It tries to please everyone which 
means it is a complex toolbox. One thing I have learnt by lurking 
in this project is how much effort goes into compiler/library 
development to make it great. NoGC and safe just show how hard 
that can be. Lots of work on corner cases. Maybe with hindsight D 
should have been less OOP and more FP (destructuring data 
anyone?), but then you lose all those who want/are used to that 
paradigm.

I use quite a few languages. For me D is the most powerful 
language I have for getting performance. Artem wrote Sambamba as 
a student

     https://github.com/biod/sambamba

and it is now running around the world in sequencing centers. 
Many many CPU hours and a resulting huge carbon foot print. The 
large competing C++ samtools project has been trying for 8 years 
to catch up with an almost unchanged student project and they are 
still slower in many cases.

     
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sambamba-discussion/z1U7VBwKfgs

Just saying. Much better to choose D over C++. I also work on a 
C++ project and I find it to be a royal pain compared to writing 
software in D.

Note that Artem used the GC and only took GC out for critical 
sections in parallel code. I don't buy these complaints about GC.

The complaints about breaking code I don't see that much either. 
Sambamba pretty much kept compiling over the years and with 
LDC/LLVM latest we see a 20% perfomance increase. For free (at 
least from our perspective). Kudos to LDC/LLVM efforts!!

Very excited to see gdc pick up too. We need the GNU projects.

So, do we need change? You can always try and improve process and 
over the last years W&A have been pushing for that.

Let me state here that  D is anarchy driven development in all 
its glory (much like the Linux kernel). I believe it is great.

I think, in addition to standard packaging in Linux distros 
(which is coming), D could use more industry support (much like 
the Linux kernel). D being a performance language for software 
engineers I would look at the extremes of HPC and mobile to 
succeed. How do we wake those companies up? Especially those with 
large investments in C++. Those we should invite to Dconf.

I remember one guy at Google telling me that every time someone 
would bring up "Why don't we write this in D instead?". That was 
10 years ago. Google invested in Python and Go instead - but 
still write heaps of code in C++. Go figure.