My choice to pick Go over D ( and Rust ), mostly non-technical

SealabJaster sealabjaster at gmail.com
Fri Oct 8 18:05:47 UTC 2021


On Friday, 8 October 2021 at 15:45:10 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
> General question: how much of this is still true?

I'd say a lot of it is still true. Especially in terms of 
packages.

In languages like Go and C# you get standard interfaces for a lot 
of things (logging, HTTP, etc.). This means libraries all share a 
common ground to work together with, even when you use third 
party frameworks (Gin builds off of Go's standard HTTP stuff, 
Giraffe sits on top of ASP Core, C# graphql libraries integrate 
with the standard dependency injection stuff, etc.)

In D you have experimental packages at best, and dead dub 
packages at (common) worst. And libraries have no real 
integration with one another.

Everyone seems to prefer writing their own code, because for one 
reason or another, existing code just doesn't work/suit their use 
case/whatever, thus leading to most packages simply dying due to 
lack of interest, lack of maintainers, and so on.

D supports too many paradigms and wildly different usages (gc, 
nogc, betterc) that unless a package is completely "perfect", it 
seems to just be dropped off peoples' radars.

Is this even as big an issue as I feel it is? No clue.

Is there something we can even do about it? No clue.

And I've gone on about this a bit before, but in terms of a "get 
shit done" language, D isn't much of a competitor. If I want to 
get something tapped out quick and easy, I'd rather use C# or Go 
where everything is well tested, mostly well documented, and I 
don't have to deal with C libraries just to bridge the gaps in 
missing functionality (especially making sure the code builds 
cross-platform).

Bonus points is that I get to use a VSCode plugin that works more 
than 50% of the time, and is able to cover most of the language 
features. That's not a dig at code-d btw since I'm sure it does 
the best it can manage with D's flexible syntax.

In other words, there's just a lot of friction getting things 
done with this language, even though the benefits of the language 
itself are mostly worth the effort, sometimes it's just easier to 
drop to a more straightforward language + libraries.

With other languages I get the feeling of people rallying around 
specific things and the language itself, while with D I get the 
feeling of everyone being spread out, and only occasionally 
gathering together once in a while.


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