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

[Andre Pany]

On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 10:09:40 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> On Sunday, 14 April 2019 at 20:48:44 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> wrote:
>> On 4/14/19 2:09 PM, IGotD- wrote:
>>> That in mind it is absolute killer feature of D to have a 
>>> C/C++ FFI that many other languages don't have.
>>
>> I agree, and sadly it's not a popular enough opinion. A couple 
>> of years ago I called on the phone two of our most promising 
>> contributors who asked what they should help with, and pitched 
>> the core.stdcpp project. They both declined it. No hard 
>> feelings - we're grateful enough they chose to do other things 
>> within the D milieu -, but it goes to show that planning and 
>> "finding a guy" and telling people what to work on is easier 
>> said than done, at least for me. I'm glad Manu has taken point 
>> on that, wished he got wider help.
>
> I have considered using D for a long time, and yet haven't. The 
> reasons are maybe applicable to many. Ultimately it boils down 
> to what you need to do to make a living. If you had tons of 
> spare money you can probably afford to work on something you 
> like or think is good; but if you need to earn then you have to 
> go where the demand is.
>
> The tooling (editor and debugger) is important too for anyone 
> that wants to get the job done or suggest D to an organisation. 
> Here is a proposal:
>
> Freeze D development for 2 years and redirect all energy to 
> tooling.

Could you please tell what do you miss from the tooling? For me 
Intellij D plugin combined with language server works like a 
charme. Code completion, linter, formatting, everything works 
fine  Dub is working perfectly for all my use cases. I was never 
in need to really start the debugger but debugging is working to 
some extend in windows and is working fine on linux. I am even 
able to develop applications in windows and using WSL directly 
compile and debug them on linux.

Kind regards
Andre