Nim programming language finally hit 1.0

Chris wendlec at tcd.ie
Tue Oct 1 10:43:24 UTC 2019


On Tuesday, 1 October 2019 at 10:05:31 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 October 2019 at 08:47:19 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> 1. Walter admits that D only caters for a few users with very 
>> specific use cases (niches).
>
> Which niches are these?
>
> My impression is that D primarily caters for users that want 
> the feature-set of C++, but find C++ to be too inconvenient or 
> complicated.

Look at the companies listed here:

https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html

and the posters who say "everything's great" often work for one 
of those companies. Weka.io and Symmetry come to mind. It's 
mostly real time (e.g. Funkwerk, sociomantic) and high throughput 
stuff (Weka.io etc.). It's mostly cloud / server based (that's 
why mobile is regarded unimportant). This is perfectly fine, if 
that's what D wants, but please be clear about it.

I think what puts people off is that D is advertised as a general 
purpose "best language in the world", but is in fact a special 
interest niche language. Imo, it's this dishonesty that is at the 
heart of a lot of discontent and rants on this forum, and 
misunderstandings. Of course, an engineer who works on cloud 
based real time systems will not (care to) understand the 
frustrations of a team that wants to make their D program 
available on Android and iOS. If you look at the list of 
organizations above, it makes perfect sense why certain aspects - 
that any modern language needs nowadays - are neglected: mobile 
(cf. mostly cloud based users), proper tooling (cf. carefully 
crafted internal tooling in each organization).

It calls my attention, though, that at Mercedes-Benz R&D "D is 
used for software development tools." Apparently, they're not yet 
convinced, and if you look at the other organizations above, they 
can afford to use a highly specialized, exotic language like D, 
because they're not too big and use it for very specific tasks. 
But once things get bigger, e.g. Mercedes-Benz, the company 
starts to tread more carefully.


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