Future of D

[bachmeier]

On Sunday, 29 October 2023 at 18:12:46 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:

> C++ is the low risk option, for a typical business, because it 
> will still be around in 20 years, it will be well maintained, 
> you will always be able to find a pool of developers who can 
> maintain your code, it will link and compile with thousands of 
> industry standard libraries, frameworks, protocols, hardware 
> platforms.
>
> So D is higher risk in that you may find yourself having to 
> spend time (and much money) coding up your own libraries and 
> hardware support. In 10 years time you might struggle to find D 
> developers. However, the reward with D is that you can achieve 
> the required functionality, over the next few years, much more 
> quickly (i.e. more cheaply) than with C++.

There's a lot of speculation in those two paragraphs. The risk 
with D (using your definition of risk) is non-zero, but not much 
greater than zero. If nobody is using D in ten years, which is a 
very low probability scenario, you can compile the existing D 
codebase and call it from C++ just like you'd call any C code.

While C++ will be around in 20 years, the cost of maintaining the 
code could be high enough that it's not worth it. A real danger 
with C++ is that it's not the first choice of new developers. In 
20 years you might be competing for talent with the finance 
industry. That's a battle few companies are going to win.

You're also ignoring everything that takes place from now until 
2043. Higher cost of code development and maintenance is quite a 
liability to ignore as "not a risk".