Thank you!

[Mike Parker]

On Wednesday, 8 September 2021 at 07:51:29 UTC, drug wrote:

>
> My concern wans't about D itself, it was about the community. 
> More accurately I wouldn't state that D won't take off at all, 
> but I would state that without the community the language will 
> die. Of course I can't see the situation as a whole but I got 
> the impression that too many D developers have left due to 
> political issues. Bearophile, Hara Kenji (9rnsr), joakim-noah 
> for example. I don't know the truth, it's just my impression.

Churn is natural. We've lost people over disagreements about 
management and process, personal issues, and other reasons. None 
of the names I used to see here every day when I first joined the 
community in 2003 are around anymore other than Walter, and many 
of them haven't been for ages. I wish we could keep the top 
contributors around forever, but people volunteering their time 
will always allocate it in the way that best fits their interests.

My impression is that we have more active contributors now than 
we have ever had. Razvan mentioned something to me recently about 
putting out some pull request stats to show the progression over 
time. I don't know if that will validate my impression or not, 
but it will be interesting to see.

I don't think we can read too much into the level of forum 
activity these days. Many new people who come into the community 
go straight to Discord and don't touch the forums. The channels 
there are fairly active. That's definitely a generational thing, 
I think. I also notice that many of them do not have the sort of 
C background we used to be able to reasonably expect new users 
would have.

Plenty of people are still hanging out on IRC, and when regular 
contributors have specific questions about development and 
maintenance, they usually go to Slack for that where once they 
might have come to the forums instead. I see people in those 
Slack threads who don't show up in the forums anymore.

 From my perspective, the D community is more vibrant than ever. 
It's got a different vibe now than before, definitely, but I 
don't see that as a bad thing.