It is the year 2020: why should I use / learn D?

[Chris]

On Friday, 23 November 2018 at 23:56:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/23/2018 4:59 AM, Chris wrote:

> Actually, a person in the D community was working for a couple 
> years on an ARM back end, but he eventually lost interest and 
> it was abandoned.
>
> Building a backend is something usually teams of people work on 
> exclusively. It's a little unfair to expect me to do one 
> spending an hour or so a day on it. I can't order someone to 
> work on it, I can't hire someone to work on it.

> It had to wait until someone both competent and self-motivated 
> stepped up to do it.

Of course you cannot do everything alone. I never expected that. 
But ARM was never really high on the agenda. It need not be dmd, 
ldc is fine, but it was never really pushed. Maybe it's not 
"challenging" enough for the core devs, I don't know. But it is 
essential enough that it should have gotten a higher priority 
than just to wait until someone stepped up.

I see a lot of other things happening like the re-implementation 
of the D compiler in D. Fine. But do I as a user really care if 
it's written in D or C++? I can see that it's a prestigious thing 
to have, but when I see where D/ARM is, I just wonder if the 
priorities are right. Maybe the D Foundation could pay (or could 
have paid) someone, to set up a LDC-ARM toolchain (it need not be 
a dmd backend). 6 months to year I think would be a realistic 
time frame? What do you reckon?

If you develop software for ordinary people to use (not in-house 
frameworks for ads or time tables), they do ask you if there's an 
app for Android or iOS. And with D it's still too much of a 
gamble. It's quite a chore to set it up, and then it might break 
with the every new compiler release and it might or might not 
cater for various Android (and iOS) releases. And then it's wait, 
wait, wait...work around etc.

I don't understand how things are prioritized in D. Basic and 
important things seem to be at the bottom of the list (XML 
parser), other things get huge attention while they are of 
dubious value to many users. This is why I don't completely buy 
the "we don't have enough resources" argument. The scarce 
resources you have are not used wisely in my opinion. And it is a 
pity when I see that D has loads of potential (C/C++ interop, 
Objective-C interop etc.) but other new languages overtake D 
because they focus on practical issues too.