Nim programming language finally hit 1.0

[Chris]

On Wednesday, 2 October 2019 at 10:10:56 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:

>
> That list is a bit difficult to assess as some of the companies 
> have not moved forward with the language, but doesn't some of 
> the those that have gone with D wholesale use their own 
> runtimes?

I don't know, but I'm sure they have carefully crafted special 
purpose tooling around their D code (else you cannot work with D 
anyway).

> But yes, real time seems to be a niche with some adoption. 
> Batch-dataprocessing seems to be a niche (I assume this 
> accounts for situations where developers have failed to bring 
> Python or other high level language up to the performance they 
> wanted).

> But there isn't really many features in the language that makes 
> it particularly well suited for real time or dataprocessing. It 
> is mostly on the library/runtime level.

I suppose it's because it's easier to write in D than C/C++ 
(productivity) and the native performance gave them an edge over 
companies that use(d) Python for data analysis. D, like Python, 
is good for fast prototyping and, unlike Python, it is quite 
fast. But does it really scale?

[...]

>
> Right, what it suggests is that  Mercedes-Benz R&D  don't see 
> any obvious solution for what they want to do, so they look at 
> smaller languages. Then they will try it for some task, but the 
> acid test is if they expand as they go forward.

Apparently, Facebook has dropped active D development. I'm always 
skeptical when I hear "X is using D now." People often say that D 
needs a big player behind it, but the big players actually have 
to be very careful with exotic languages. If it doesn't scale, 
they cannot use it. It's not that they're all knobs adopting the 
latest hipster fashion or sticking to old technologies. They 
simply cannot risk to be stuck with an exotic language. Smaller 
organizations that operate within very special scenarios can 
afford to use D and it might give them an edge over their 
competitors. But that doesn't mean D is a good choice per se, and 
keep in mind that for standard technologies like XML parsing and 
the like they might still rely on battle-tested libraries written 
in C/C++.