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

Sat Apr 13 09:16:09 UTC 2019

On Saturday, 13 April 2019 at 08:28:37 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:

> I try to! I try to stick up for D every chance I get... but 
> honestly at this point it is starting to get a little 
> embarrassing to do so. I have been using D for 7 years and been 
> trying to tell people how awesome it is... but after so long 
> and still almost nobody is using it... it kinda makes you 
> wonder what's the point, why do I keep trying? Im not really 
> good enough to contribute to the compiler or make some fancy 
> new library or something.. but I love D and want people to love 
> it too, that's why I find it so sad D is in the place it is.
>
> When I started using D I was in my freshman year at university, 
> back then it looked like D had a real chance of becoming a 
> replacement for C++... now I feel like D has almost no chance 
> compared to back then...
>
> It just feels sad

I don't know what your definition of "almost nobody" is, but the 
number one library on code.dlang.org right now is vibe.d, with 
the following stats:

488 downloads today

3402 downloads this week

12354 downloads this month

390085 downloads total

Look through the list. One of my packages, DerelictSDL2, has the 
following stats:

95 downloads today

521 downloads this week

2286 downloads this month

89247 downloads total

 From my perspective, that's plenty of people.

Also, any expectation that D will be "a replacement for C++" is 
just misguided. No language is going to replace C++. It's an 
*alternative* to C++. And a good one. It's that philosophy that 
drives the ABI compatibility with both C and C++. We don't need D 
implementations of libraries that have years of development, 
debugging, testing and maintenance behind them when we can just 
interop with the existing ones. The ability to implement a new 
component or tool in D and be able to link with an existing 
codebase and libraries that the team are already familiar with is 
a big deal.

D's doing just fine. It's been slowly and steadily growing. Not 
fast enough for some folks, and that's fine. We've recently 
started quarterly D Foundation meetings involving foundation 
members and representatives from D shops. At the first meeting, 
we had the companies everyone knows about--Dunhumby 
(Sociomantic), Funkwerk, WekaIO, and Symmetry. At the second 
meeting, we added representatives from three companies you 
probably haven't heard of. Our third meeting is happening at 
DConf. I'll be blogging about all of this very soon and will talk 
about what's coming out of these meetings.

My advice is to get a little perspective. You have your own 
bubble in your own slice of the internet and your own slice of 
the real world. That you don't see or hear much about D in your 
bubble is not evidence that no one else is seeing or hearing 
about it.

Every post I public-facing post I publish on the D blog gets 
shared on reddit. Some generate discussions, some do not. But 
there's been a big difference since I first started managing the 
blog. Initially, every post I shared attracted trolls eager to 
bash D on principle and most posts were lucky to get over a 60% 
upvote rate. Now, the trolls rarely appear, the upvote rate tends 
to hover between 70-90%, and the total number of upvotes often 
goes over 50 (I used to think 30 was a lucky day). The most 
recent, a highlight of DPP, got 75 total votes and a 86% upvote 
rate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bas2my/dpp_include_c_and_c_headers_directly_in_your_d/

That post has generated just over 1,000 views in the 5 days since 
it was published. The post on memoization in D that I published 
at the end of March only got 32 upvotes at reddit and a 76% 
upvote rate (and again, no trolls bashing it in the reddit 
thread), but it's had just shy of 15,000 page views:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b7augl/memoization_in_the_d_programming_language/

My point is that, yes, people are hearing about D and, from my 
perspective in my bubble, the positive messages and curiosity are 
outweighing the negativity.

People don't have to like D. That's fine. I respect some folks 
are unhappy and now and again will vocally express their critical 
opinions. That's a fact of life. But there are plenty of people 
who are happy (or at least satisfied) and who are using it both 
commercially and personally. Our focus needs to be on retaining 
them. We will lose some along the way, because not everyone will 
agree with every priority or every decision, or with the 
management process, or whatever. But improvements are happening, 
will continue to happen, and the language will be better for it. 
It's already better today than it was 5 years ago, or even 5 
years before that. As it continues to improve, it will appeal to 
more people and some of them will become contributors to help 
make it even better.

And it may sound like a broken record, but we always need 
contributors. The bigger we get, the more we need. And there are 
never enough. We've got a new initative that has come out of the 
quarterly meetings that is one step to address that (I'm not 
ready to announce it just yet) and the ongoing fundraising 
campaigns are another (and note that donations to the Pull 
Request Manager campaign have slowed: 
https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/NDUwNTY=).

D does not have the backing of a cash-laden organization, as 
someone pointed out earlier, so like it or not, it is a language 
where there's still a lot of DIY. Anyone expecting fully featured 
IDEs, native graphics libs, parity with languages like Rust, 
Swift, C#, etc..., is in the wrong place. There are some fair 
criticisms to be made about management, but that isn't one of 
them. Resources, resources, resources. One must either 
contribute, accept the status quo, or move on. Meanwhile, those 
who are contributing continue to do so, some for free some for 
compensation, but all because they accept that if they don't do 
it, it won't get done.

I've been following D since 2003 and using it since 2004. When I 
look back over the stretch of time, I can't help but see D as a 
success. I'm doing what I can to make it more so.