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

Thu Apr 25 11:27:53 UTC 2019

On Thursday, 25 April 2019 at 00:28:41 UTC, Greatsam4sure wrote:
>
> On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu K
> This is a user testimony of D
>
>
> https://medium.com/tripaneer-techblog/why-we-chose-the-d-language-and-vibe-d-3684131a71cd

Sorry, but same could be said about other languages that have 
better tooling and community support. With the important 
difference that those other languages will not blow up in your 
face due to the maintainers fiddling around with new features. As 
regards maintenance, with D I used to lose a lot of time fixing 
my code from one compiler version to the next (what a waste of 
time) or trying to figure out what would be the best way to work 
around D's messy string handling and how it would affect both the 
performance and the flow / logic of the program. Again, Tripaneer 
seems to use D only for one specific purpose, so it's a niche 
application that says nothing about D's _general_ usefulness. You 
can write a great program for one particular purpose in Lisp too 
and go on about how great it is. That says nothing about how you 
will fare once you leave your bubble.

I started to use D for a very specific purpose, because back in 
the day D was the only language that offered what I needed (e.g. 
seamless C interop + DLL support, reasonably fast native code). 
We were a bit pressed for time, so D was the best option. 
However, once the whole thing grew bigger and we had to leave the 
bubble to cater for mobile for example, things no longer looked 
so bright, and DIY is not an option for everyone (due to lack of 
time / resources / expertise). It's as if D sold you a 
multi-purpose toolkit that only works at room temperature.

And of course, there's the paradox that the better you get at D, 
the more you know about programming, the more you know about 
programming, the more you notice that D is poorly implemented.