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

[Walter Bright]

On 11/24/2018 7:19 AM, Chris wrote:
> Of course you cannot do everything alone. I never expected that. But ARM was 
> never really high on the agenda.

It cannot be high on the agenda without a self-motivated, competent person to 
work on it.


> But it is essential enough that it should have gotten a higher 
> priority than just to wait until someone stepped up.

I have a lot of history with people asking me "what can I work on?" I give them 
a list of suggestions, and they work on something not on that list, i.e. what 
they want to work on.

The D community is a volunteer one. I cannot order anyone to work on anything.

For example, you can step up and work to improve any aspect of D that matters to 
you.


> 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++?

Not directly, no. But there are a number of problems working on that code due to 
it being half in D, half in C++, such as:

1. C/C++ is just a clumsy language to work in when one is used to D.
2. Half in one language, half in the other, means you have to main two sets of 
declarations of the data structures, and there's hell to pay if they get out of 
sync.
3. There's lots of technical debt in the old backend. Redoing it in D makes that 
a lot easier to improve.
4. I don't have to deal with C/C++'s portability problems when it's in D. I've 
spent a stupid amount of time just dealing with size_t.


> 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.

It's fairly straightforward. Things that get attention do so because a 
self-motivated and competent person decides to solve it. Commercial 
organizations that rely on D tend to spend money solving their problems with D, 
not others. The D Foundation does have some money to spend, but you may not 
realize just how much a competent compiler engineer costs!