Why is D unpopular?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 27 April 2022 at 22:43:25 UTC, Adrian Matoga wrote:
> of like it) at work. I've recently returned to tinkering with 
> electronics and programming at home so let me share my view.

Do you use or plan to use microcontrollers? If so, with what 
language?


> technology or even non-technology related idea too. Python 
> became the default language for ML, because it was easy enough 
> for people whose main focus wasn't programming, and who didn't 
> require system level performance because available bindings to 
> C libraries were good enough.

Yes, but I think this also has something to do with Python 
replacing Matlab in academic research institutions. Python is 
becoming the default platform for analysis and experimentation.


> What D tried to do was to be "better C++" or "better C", but in 
> 2022 it's about 40 years too late to be successful in that. 
> There're millions of programs in C and C++ that have been good 
> enough to make revenue for many companies and thus convinced 
> others to invest more money, effort and time in more stuff that 
> depends on C and C++.

Yes, and they are ISO standards, so nobody "owns" C or C++. That 
creates a more "open" evolution that is industry-oriented (the 
main purpose of ISO is to make industrial tools and interfaces 
interoperable).


> do something beyond those. I recall I had some good experience 
> with C# in terms of how quickly I was able to reuse existing 
> libraries and implement any new code, especially with pretty 
> convenient tooling from MS, but that was long time ago when it 
> wasn't seriously usable outside Windows and I didn't have much 
> interest in developing for Windows later.

What made C# easy to use? Was it auto-completions and suggestions 
in the IDE, or was it something that has to do with the language 
itself?


> What I've missed the most so far in D was a zero-effort reuse 
> of C libraries, because there's a lot of useful libs in C I 
> already know.

Yes, has the new import-C feature been helpful for you in that 
regard?


> Of course it's much less tedious to interface C in D than in 
> Python, but I bet if D had a fully-blown ImportC from the very 
> beginning, it could be where C++ is today.

When compared to C++, I'd say that D still needs to get its 
memory management story right and fix some language short-coming 
(incomplete features), but memory management is at least being 
looked at actively now. (People expect something more than 
malloc/free and roll-your-own ref-counting.)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it was an interesting read!