Worse than impolite

[Adam D Ruppe]

On Saturday, 23 December 2023 at 20:17:29 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> the fact is that without him, this project wouldn't exist.

In the spirit of Christmas, let's spread holiday cheer and give 
thanks to the many people who made D what it is today.

Walter Bright, of course, wrote the first draft of the language 
and compiler, and lends his public credibility to the project. 
But, he is far from alone in making the project exist.

* * *

Without Andrei Alexandrescu, D certainly wouldn't look anything 
like it does now. Being the primary author of Phobos as it exists 
today (Phobos before Andrei was essentially recycled Javascript 3 
support modules and some thinly wrapped C bindings), Andrei has 
quite possibly had the greatest single influence on the timbre of 
D code.

Additionally, Andrei is the one primarily responsible for 
organizing the D Language Foundation and the various D 
scholarship programs that drive much of the internal development.

He also lent his pen to D, writing the book titled "The D 
Programming Language", laying out both a resource for learning D 
and a vision for its future, in a remarkably readable format.

I'm sure if I actually thought about this, the list could go on.

* * *

Don Clugston did significant work on D's math support and is 
notable for being the one who created CTFE.

* * *

Bill Baxter, Matthew Wilson, and a few others are influential in 
creating much of D metaprogramming as we know it today, including 
innovations such as `static if` and `mixin template`.

* * *

Timon Gehr, Jonathan Marler, Daniel Murphy, Kenji Hara, Sebastian 
Wilzbach, Mike Franklin, Benjamin Thaut, Michel Fortin, Jacob 
Carlborg, David Gileadi, and so many more have all left 
significant marks on the D language and compiler.

* * *

Jan Knepper and Brad Roberts are names we don't often see in 
copyright notices, but have been key figures behind the scenes 
running D's infrastructure. If not for their contributions, we 
would probably not have ever heard of D, as the website wouldn't 
work! Andrew Edwards deserves a callout for kickstarting off the 
recent series of DConfs.

* * *

David Friedman left his mark on D by starting the gdc project, 
producing the first fully, front to back, free software compiler 
for the D language.

Johannes Pfau and later, Iain Buclaw, would pick this up and 
bring serious credibility to D by leveraging gcc's broad target 
support and advanced optimization capabilities to keep it 
competitive with new upstarts, and the vast experience Iain 
Buclaw has brought to bear on D for the better part of 14 years 
now has kept it compatible with use cases the rest of the team 
didn't even know existed.

* * *

Tomas Lindquist Olsen and Christian Kamm are primarily 
responsible for kicking off the LDC project, later picked up by 
David Nadlinger (who added ARM support!), and now maintained by 
Martin Kinkelin.

Without their work, D quite possibly wouldn't work on modern 
Macs, Android phones, or WebAssembly.

* * *

Sean Kelly is primarily responsible for druntime as we know it 
today. If not for him, D would in all probability be 
significantly less capable than it is now, notably, it was his 
Fiber code that allowed Sönke Ludwig's work to get started.

Other notable names that come to mind in this area are Alex Rønne 
Petersen, Leandro Lucarella, Martin Nowak, Steven Schveighoffer.

* * *

Brad Anderson, Mike Wey, Christopher Miller, Lars Tandle 
Kyllingstad, Vladimir Panteleev, Mike Parker, Jonathan M. Davis, 
Ketmar Dark, Guillaume Piolat, many, many, many more in writing 
the libraries that make D what it is.

* * *

When it comes to the tooling support, Rainer Schuetze, Brian 
Schott, and Jan Jurzitza immediately come to mind, and I know 
there's others, there's a bit of recency bias in my memory.

* * *

Laeeth Isharc needs to get special mention for funding and 
organizing so much D-related work.

* * *

I'd call out Paul Backus, David Simcha, Dejan Lekic, Peter 
Alexander, JMD again, and so many others for new user support 
over the years, without whom who knows how many people wouldn't 
have stuck around past the initial hurdles.

* * * * *

And there's a *great* many I didn't mention here.

Of course, it is possible, even likely, that if many of these 
individuals weren't there, someone else would have done similar 
work. So maybe, just maybe, we can say that without them, the 
project would still exist.

But in the timeline we're living, these are the people who were 
actually there, who actually did do the work to make these things 
happen.


Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas.