D community roadmap

[tastyminerals]

On Tuesday, 24 November 2020 at 03:22:19 UTC, JohnT wrote:
> First of all congrats to all D community for all their hard 
> work. D is one of the languages which I fell in love at first 
> sight. There are lot of posts in this forum about similar 
> sentiment.  We have really great engineers working on amazing 
> features. What we really need is good marketing, some polishing 
> and a direction. D really can be better than most other 
> languages.Its a chicken and egg problem. But we need more 
> marketing/benchmarks blogs etc where we compete with other 
> languages on features. We should do dedicated effort to cleanup 
> and make language simpler.
>
> a. We should do a survey similar to Go/Rust. And we should hear 
> the community of the top features we need. Even if original 
> designers disagree.
> b. Focus should be selling our strengths like strong interop 
> with C/C++. Neither Go/Rust has this. D has lot more chance to 
> shine in this. Companies wont replace billions of C/C++ code. 
> What we need is incremental where they can replace and D can 
> work with C++. We need more effort to make easy transitions.
> c. Focus on tooling/stability.
> d. Benchmarking of most frequently used libraries like 
> json/vibe/networking etc against other languages and publish 
> this.
> e. Marketing D as both systems/scripting language with GC and 
> non GC with lot of articles and samples with benchmarking.
> f. Interop with C/C++, faster builds, easy compared to rust are 
> some strengths we should market.
> e. We need small working groups for networking/standard 
> library/ server/ embedded/security/tooling etc who focus on the 
> issues in those domain.
> g. Mentorship for folks who wish to contribute.
>
> I know the answer is why dont you do it. Yes I would love to 
> help. If people define a ROADMAP where each release has issues 
> and features in the order of priority and its maintained 
> somewhere, people like us will do their small part whenever we 
> find free time. Its time for C/C++ to go. So far I see D as 
> only better option. Wish from a D fan.

Well put, well put.
I've been playing with D for some time and what I learnt the D 
community is kinda fragmented or rather sparse. Mostly C/C++ 
veteran folks who know their tools and can get around anything. I 
feel like they are content. D gives them what they want already 
and they got used to live with the rest.

Yes, marketing could definitely be better. Not many ppl stumble 
into D and thus the community does not grow that much. I 
sometimes miss this youth vigor which I see on Julia/Nim/Rust 
forums. It is a bit unfair to know that many newer languages 
boast the features which D had for a long time. But nobody knew 
about it when it mattered.