A strategic vision for D

Joakim dlang at joakim.fea.st
Tue May 1 12:26:25 UTC 2018


I realize it's right before the conference, but I'd like to put 
out a request for Walter and Andrei to spend five minutes during 
your talks laying out some overarching strategy for how you see D 
evolving. It could be during the keynotes or leading off the Q&A 
panel, but I think it's worth laying a broad strategy out there.

Specifically, what uses do you see D being put to for the next 
five years and how do we make it better in those directions.  For 
example, in what way you'd like to see D get better as a language 
for writing apps, or what particular niches you see D as a 
systems language doing well in first.

For another example, here's what I'd say, ie my strategic vision: 
the pendulum is about to swing hard back towards the client, 
towards the billion and a half mobile devices sold each year, and 
D is ideally positioned with its native efficiency to do well 
there. However, since it's not the blessed language for any 
mobile platform, like Kotlin or Swift, it will take much work on 
libraries to pull that off.

Some caveats: since D is not controlled by a company with W&A as 
co-CEOs, they cannot obviously order people to follow their 
vision. However, that should leave you free to really share your 
unexpurgated thoughts, after all, we're all free to ignore it. ;)

Another is that perhaps D has chosen to evolve tactically as 
opposed to strategically, carefully picking off wins with a new 
feature or mode of programming but not following any grand 
strategy, similar to how Linus Torvalds claims he didn't have any 
grand vision for linux either. However, a strategic vision can 
inspire people to work towards that goal, if there is one to be 
shared.


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