Just an example, why D rocks, and C++ s***s...

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Sunday, 20 March 2022 at 14:56:45 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:
> In line, I believe, with many of your posts I can see a lot of 
> good reasons to avoid D at this time: if you are a contractor, 
> or work to support/extend a very large code base, or have 
> conservative management, or prefer cut and paste development or 
> ... then D is probably not for you.
>
> OTOH, if you aim to disrupt then D could be a great choice.

I don't think a language has to be commercially viable for 
corporations in order to be interesting to use, but Paolo is spot 
on when it comes to D having lost direction and falling behind…

It is better to just say that competing head-to-head with C++ is 
not a goal than to give the impression that it is while spending 
time on things that doesn't provide any advantages for existing 
C++ programmers (e.g. weird string interpolation etc) and also 
not having a clear plan for reaching parity with C++17. If D ever 
gets there with this lack of focus you'll be up against C++26 
when D has the C++17 features set and you will stil not be able 
to win over C++ programmers.

But is totally fair to create something in a direction completely 
different from where C++ is heading, if that is more interesting 
to the D designers, but then they should forget everything they 
think they know about C++ and create something novel.

In general, there are too many languages now that are 
almost-the-same, so if going head-to-head with C++ isn't 
realistic/fun… then stake out a niche that isn't already filled 
with other languages.

(my personal opinion is that going for per-actor-gc and ARC could 
be interesting enough to create a distance to most other 
languages).