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On 09/04/2019 01:07, Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:ytjluorzgqmzozwawhwu@forum.dlang.org"
type="cite">IMO, Rust's only feature is the borrow checker; the
rest of the language stinks. But, statically-checked memory
safety is so fantastic Rust is destined for success. If D had an
equally effective mechanism for memory safety and fearless
concurrency, there would be no reason for Rust to exist, and there
would be no competition for D.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
It seems to me that Rust's real killer feature is that it is backed
by Mozilla. How many major modern languages are really successful
without major corporate backing? C# has Microsoft, Java had Sun/has
Oracle[1], Javascript had Netscape (when Netscape mattered) as well
as browser support from Microsoft (when that mattered), Go has
Google, Swift has Apple. In comparison, D does not have big name
backing (sorry, no offence intended!).<br>
<br>
(I should add that I think that C and C++ are exceptions to this
since they have, in comparison, been around for much longer and were
able to get up a head of steam in their own standards-driven right
before corporate backing came to matter in the same way that it
seems to now).<br>
<br>
And so even if D had the same (or better) features than Rust or Go,
it would still face competitors.<br>
<br>
Thus it seems to me that technical improvements such as adding
features to D to improve its concurrency and memory safety are
certainly important, as I understand it, but *marketing* is
important too. Is it possible that some major project with the
profile of Firefox could be (partly) moved to D from C++?<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
( A bit about me: This is my first post here and I am not currently
a D programmer. I joined this mail list to learn a bit more about D.
I am currently working on a cross platform thick client application
project in C# (yes, thick client app projects still exist). It is
possible that future versions of this project could be written in
one of Rust, D or Go, depending on how each language develops
including issues like readability, wasm support, asynch/concurrency
support, and cross platform GUI support ).<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Footnote:-<br>
1: Luckily for Java, it had already built up a head of steam in its
own right before Oracle came along.<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Mark Rousell
</pre>
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