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

[Nicholas Wilson]

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.
>
> What makes a compiler successful is not just the compiler 
> itself but the easy to create real world business solutions by 
> the mass of programmers in the world. Such people are not 
> interested in wasting their time trying to get things to work, 
> they want a product that will allow them to get as much work 
> done in the shorted amount of time. D fails miserably at that 
> in the real world.

I think you will find that D _is_ used successfully in 
businesses, if not the businesses you'd like to see it be used in.

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

Dlangui is fine, Guillaume Piolat does Audio in D, I presume his 
libraries are good, vibe. is pretty awesome, but I take your 
point.

> The D community thinks that if it has a binding then it must be 
> the same. Bindings are not solutions. One is just working in C, 
> so what is the point of D then?

Au contraire, a good binding means interoperability and you don't 
have to design, engineer, develop, and document (as much) the 
thing you want to do.

> Essentially D costs too much and has too little in return.

That is a business decision that you need to evaluate.

> After all, you can pretty much do everything you want in C++ 
> that you can do with D.

Most certainly not, anything that requires reflection you can't.

> The sole reason that D has failed is the management of D has 
> failed...

It hasn't failed completely, yet... the dconf AGM will hopefully 
change things.

> Most programmers don't give a shit about meta programming and 
> all the cool shit D can do.

Even if they don't care directly, the cascade effects are 
significant, i.e. they don't care that they can do it directly, 
they care that they can use what someone else has written.

> So what is the point of them using it when most other things 
> suck? All the effort that D wasted in library after library 
> could have been focused on creating the things that users 
> want/need but the libraries are now defunct and are bit rotting.

c.f. bindings

> Eventually people will give up on maintaining D(in 10-20 years 
> when new processors are out that require massive updating of D 
> or a new OS comes about). D will die a slow and painful death. 
> It didn't have to be that way but that is the outcome when you 
> don't plan properly.  It has happened many times with many 
> things... It's nature at work.

Maybe, maybe not.

> At most D could hope to do is get a large company with the 
> resources to take it over like Microsoft... but they have no 
> incentive to do that. Since D can integrate with C/C++ there is 
> potential. But why would they do such a thing when they can 
> just modify C++?
>
> D has never been used for a major commercial app. It touts all 
> it's uses, which is minuscule compared to the major players and 
> most of these use cases are more it computing 
> applications/utilities than anything major. I believe D is a 
> failure for very complex real world apps. It just can't handle 
> the load. A large business isn't going to waste it's time with 
> something that has so many drawbacks and few benefits... it 
> makes no sense to them to use D for anything serious. Even 
> though D can be used to write specific code, since it does not 
> perfectly integrate what is the point of just not writing it in 
> the main language, even if it requires a little more work?

Just because you don't see then doesn't mean they don't exist.