Future of D

[Max Haughton]

On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 18:47:39 UTC, data pulverizer 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 9 December 2020 at 15:42:15 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
>> https://aberba.com/2020/why-i-still-use-d/
>>
>> Valid points?
>
> It's an interesting article. For me I'm not that bothered 
> whether D becomes huge as long as it keeps growing, and remains 
> "vital". It's more important to me to be able to do funded/paid 
> projects with D - that's the cirlce I'm trying to square. Other 
> than that I'm more interested in the "quality of the language", 
> whether it works well, remains powerful and productive, and 
> feels "good" when I write it.
>
> I'm also more interested in the community. One thing that 
> initially shocked me about the D language is that random people 
> would suddenly turn up and start "dissing" the language and the 
> community seemed to take these criticisms in its stride, which 
> I really liked. I wouldn't like D community to become toxic, 
> aloof, or to drive out criticisms even if they seem unfair. 
> These can easily happen in programming language 
> forums/communities. Even if it leads to nothing dissent can be 
> healthy.
>
> I think that funded projects in academic departments can be a 
> one way of increasing the popularity of D. For example an 
> academic keen on D chooses to implement some government funded 
> application in D, which other people use and become familiar 
> with the language. This is often the way languages become more 
> popular - or gain widespread use, e.g. Scala (from Spark) and 
> Julia (from many different projects).

I really think properly killing the GC would give us a big boost 
in fresh blood to the community. It would still be there, but 
it's a huge turn off to new users. That and a bit of blog-spam, I 
constantly see articles for new languages that are (frankly) a 
bit rubbish compared to various D features but because they are 
post-(new generation of languages) they are "cooler"