Why is D unpopular, redux.

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 13:06:41 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> How many does DPlug need to become independent of the original 
> author?

Thinking too much about this nowadays :)

Realistically it take one well-selling product from someone else.

The best case scenario is a medium to large company to adopt and 
fork the open-source library, to eventually maintain it because 
it can't scale to their uses. Frameworks like this can be seen as 
asset by people with vertical ambitions (the sector tries 
concentrating). Good riddance :)

The worst case it, surprisingly, that more and more beginners 
would appear (or people posturing as beginners), taking an 
increasing amount of basic support until the maintainer resign. 
This is actually the number one risk, and one possible 
counter-measure is to make everyone pay and give them no access 
to the bugtracker, like JUCE does.

So there is a "debt vs asset" position to account for, it is that 
the current community must be able to create net-positive 
contributions.

I'm always on the look out for ways to incenticize sticking 
around, making contributions, and basing revenue streams on top 
of Dplug. It's not easy to explain this to well-meaning, but 
demanding users. It might mean showing people the door.

So currently, 5 developers that I know of use the framework to 
make products for themselves ; none came from the D community. 
These are only the uses I know about, some people don't want to 
engage with a community.

Even today, Dplug could be deleted and forks would appear, 
because revenue streams depend on it, but it probably doesn't yet 
cover the full cost of evolutive maintenance - it is about 6 
man-month a year. So I'm not sure if it would last long, and that 
is a problem indeed. Revenue stream is the mechanical force that 
motivates for years. Now you must explain to users how to compete 
with you...

Dplug is a by-product of plugins that sell, it couldn't exist 
otherwise. If Vibrant had sold more than 200 copies :) perhaps it 
could have a framework too. But it was a bitter commercial 
failure and couldn't justify the maintenance, so everything about 
it is retired.

(To make a net-positive game framework, one would have to target 
game developers and the middleware market, which is a lot easier 
than the game market.)

Cost of making the by-product available in open-source is there, 
but you have unintended positive consequences too (more 
ecosystem, input, community, things happening).