Why is D unpopular?

[Bruce Carneal]

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 16:17:06 UTC, Siarhei Siamashka 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 at 13:34:35 UTC, Alexandru Ermicioi 
> wrote:
>> We should not have release switch as it is now due to those 
>> security holes mentioned.
>
> That's merely the Adam's claim. He is trying to very 
> aggressively "save" me from some non-existing problems without 
> realizing that I'm just not using D language in the same way as 
> he does. He is too busy being engaged in some sort of 
> shadowboxing against himself and is not paying attention to my 
> explanations.

Adam has "saved" many dlang programmers with his pragmatic and 
real-world-safety oriented advice.  He is the most prolific, and 
one of the most respected, dlang contributors in the discord 
threads.  His book, 
https://www.amazon.com/D-Cookbook-Adam-D-Ruppe/dp/1783287217 , 
was one of the sources I referenced when onboarding. His library 
work, https://github.com/adamdruppe/arsd , is very well regarded.

>
> To sum it up. The '-release' switch doesn't disable bounds 
> checking in @safe parts of the code. So we are fine as long as 
> the majority of code in a project is marked as @safe. Rather 
> than removing or changing the '-release' switch, I think that a 
> much better idea is to migrate more code and libraries to @safe 
> and my understanding is that D language is moving in that 
> direction. Maybe Walter can confirm or deny this?

D gives you a lot of options wrt @safe ty.  My personal 
preference, probably shared by some others, is that the defaults 
should favor correctness and convenience with all else being 
opt-in.

I'm quite concerned with ultimate performance (real time video 
processing) and yet have found it easy to employ D in a very 
safe/convenient form for almost all my code (@safe, 
immutable/const, pure, gc, throw) while using dcompute, __vector, 
@trusted, .ptr and the like when I need to be on the metal.

>
> Regarding the name of this topic. If the '-release' switch 
> removal idea gains traction, it will be a strong reason for me 
> to quit. Performance parity with C++ without unreasonable extra 
> efforts is very high on my priority list. If extra efforts are 
> unavoidable and D loses its rapid development appeal, then 
> there's always Rust as a more mainstream alternative.

The -release switch activates a combination of finer grain 
controls.  You can put together whatever combination you wish in 
your build scripts.  I don't know how a command line fixable 
inconvenience compares to those that you'd experience if you 
decamp to the Rust world but if you do I'd like to hear your take 
on it.