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

Dibyendu Majumdar d.majumdar at gmail.com
Mon Apr 15 13:52:53 UTC 2019


On Monday, 15 April 2019 at 10:47:39 UTC, Andre Pany wrote:
> 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.

I haven't tried recently but every time I tried in the past there 
were issues... developers / companies expect tooling to 'just 
work' so that they can get the job done.

I do think tinkering endlessly with D / and its libraries is the 
wrong focus. Instead core developers should select one set of 
tooling and work on making them usable; D is already good enough.

It is no good saying to programmers that okay step up and fix the 
tooling yourself. No one (unless they have spare cash to burn) 
can afford to fix the tooling and then also do their jobs. That's 
the reality whether anyone likes it or not.




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