Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[thedeemon]

> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
>> The biggest thing that makes me feel like this is that in the 
>> 7 years I have been using D I literally have never met another 
>> programmer IRL who has even heard of it. I put on my resume 
>> that I like D and every interview I get asked about it, having 
>> to explain what D even is because they have never heard of it. 
>> I have never seen a job posting listing D. Never see any 
>> projects pop up on /r/programming using D. It feels like to 
>> the rest of the programming universe, D doesn't even exist.

Personally I've noticed both on reddit and on some 
non-English-speaking social networks that at least awareness 
about D has risen a lot in last 2-3 years. More people know it 
exists and some are at least familiar with its nicer features. 
Maybe a lot less who actually use it. IRL around me everyone 
knows about D, but that's because I work in a D-using company. ;)

But in general I understand your feeling. There are so many 
languages now, not everyone can be in top 10, so there is a lot 
of second-tier ones. Usable for whoever is brave enough to use 
them, but not mainstream. D is one of them, that's ok for me. I 
love such languages, be it D, OCaml, Clean, Pony or even less 
known ones. Shall we call "not in top-10" a failure? Depends on 
the original goals, I guess.


On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 09:56:48 UTC, Nierjerson wrote:
> Yes D has failed if the goal is wide adoption. It will never 
> gain wide recognition and use because the D community fails to 
> realize that it's more than just the compiler and libraries.

With a small community, without a big corporation behind a 
language, it's hard to expect anything else. The situation is 
very similar for most second-tier languages.


> D has no decent gui, gui designer, no decent audio library, no 
> decent graphics library, no decent anything.

Back in 2012 I used DFL for GUI on Windows (pretty decent) and it 
came with Entice Designer - a GUI tool for building GUIs with 
DFL. I guess now it's probably abandoned, but it did work ok back 
then. I've made a few apps with DFL. Then some more with DLangUI, 
another fine GUI library, even cross-platform this time. Graphics 
library? I dunno, what should be there that's not already in one 
of D libs available? For me, if it's raster graphics, being able 
to create bitmaps and output them is usually enough, I can do the 
rest by hand (I started doing graphics when it was just "mov ax, 
13h; call 10h; now we have a memory-mapped 320x200 bitmap with 
256 colours palette, enjoy!") People make 3D engines in D, I've 
made a video processing app in D and another about photo 
processing.
Audio processing? Probably. That's niche enough, people like 
p0nce do it manually in D but professionaly. Again, it's hard to 
expect a big variety of high-quality tools and libraries from a 
small community of enthusiasts. But that's only natural.