Vision document for H1 2018

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 01:25:07 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
>> betterc is just another way of supporting that crowd..and it's 
>> a very big crowd.
>
> Yeah, 29% of the crowd.

29% of the existing D crowd who answered the survey, which means 
around 150 people, or about how many download one compiler, dmd, 
in an average hour of the day:

http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

Meanwhile, Walter wrote a blog post about his betterC efforts 
last year, and it was the third-most liked link from dlang.org on 
reddit over the last year, with 226 net likes:

https://www.reddit.com/domain/dlang.org/top/?sort=top&t=year

No. 2?  Another article about using D without the GC.

Now, as I've said on the forum several times, I personally don't 
care for @nogc or betterC: I don't use them.  I'm sure many 
existing D users don't either.  However, as those reddit stats 
show, there is interest from _outside_ the D community for them.

When it comes to strategic decisions like this to bring in new 
users from outside the community, you cannot depend on polling 
users within the community to figure it out.  Argue against 
betterC really bringing in new users if you want, but arguing 
that it doesn't help existing users is missing the point.

I'm not sure how successful betterC will be in pulling in those 
users, as I'm not a C/C++ programmer and don't know what they 
want, but the popularity of those links suggests the D foundation 
is on the right track.

>> Your problem is not betterc, but something else. So focus on 
>> that instead.
>
> You're right, my problem isn't BetterC, it's the fact that 
> Foundation can't get its priorities right. BetterC is a symptom.

The Foundation's priorities are not simply serving the existing 
users but growing the userbase.