Torus Trooper - old-school 3D shooter, written in D 15 years ago now running in WebAssembly

[Mike Parker]

On Tuesday, 22 December 2020 at 19:15:02 UTC, John Smith wrote:

>
> "The D programming language was trendy for a bit, 15 years ago. 
> Now it's just old tech people make blogs about reviving retro 
> games as a gimmick. It never got substantial traction because 
> it sat half way between Java and C++ in a way programmers from 
> neither camp would switch to it. Rust is fundamentally 
> different, it attacks C++ at its heart and is not only a better 
> language, but a superior programming platform. In a few years 
> the ecosystem will be large enough that there are no reasons 
> for anyone to choose C++ anymore, and at that point, what is 
> the relevance of D?"
>
> "I still love D but with the standardization of C++11 and the 
> rise of Go and Rust, D won't have a chance again."
>
> "The Python 2-to-3 transition worked because Python is too big 
> to fail. D has never reached that momentum. Rust is a more 
> modern language in comparison to D and the trend will continue 
> without D3. Also the drama back to ~2009 was pretty bad and the 
> community got hurt. Three of my colleagues wrote long programs 
> in D but have abandoned the ship."
>
> "I say this in all seriousness: this is probably a mistake, and 
> the Dlang crew should make plans to exploit the opportunity to 
> do a D3/3D release to the greatest extent possible—if only for 
> marketing purposes and while holding onto the secret that there 
> are no breaking changes involved."

There's no way we can ever eliminate this sort of talk. No matter 
what we do in the D community, no matter the progress we make, 
there will *always* be naysayers. The best any of us can do is to 
keep working toward making that progress happen.

I've been in the D community for 17 years and it has been "dying" 
or "irrelevant" or "a toy language" for that entire time Yet the 
language has continued to improve, the community has continued to 
grow, and it's the language those who stick around want to use. I 
learned long ago to ignore the noise and to focus on the work I 
want to do and on how I can do more to contribute. Some minds can 
be changed, but most never will.

And it's up to us to reach those whose minds can be changed. 
Every blog post, every tweet, every project we reference in a 
social media comment thread, has the potential to bring more 
people into the community. Some percentage of them will stay and 
some percentage of those will become contributors. And all the 
while comments like the above will appear on reddit and HN. 
Though in my experience, reddit and HN threads these days tend to 
be net positive more often than they used to be.

And we all have different ideas about what should be the priority 
at any given point in time, or what needs improvement, or in 
which direction we need to go. But as long as we keep our heads 
down and do the work, we will continue to grow.