How useful is D

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Personally, I don't do a lot of GUI programming.  If I do an interface, 
it's usually on the web, not in an application - primarily because I'm 
in the web industry.

So, I've never honestly seen GUI as anything that could be a show 
stopper.  Mostly I remember back in the good old days of MS-DOS, I would 
work on my own font drawing, widget handling, and video primitives. 
With D, I would just use already-written libraries for most of that.

D is very useful on the server side, and also on the client side.  Not 
everything is a GUI application.

Anyway, it is impractical to distribute software that uses a 
non-standard port and expect it to work on shared hosts as you say; this 
isn't a problem for most of what I do, but I have dealt with it in the 
past.  You can write CGI executables in D, of course, but also sapi 
modules.  Those wouldn't work on shared hosts either, though.

D really isn't a competitor to web languages like PHP and ASP.NET, 
though, you're right about that.

Still, what do you think FTP servers are written in?  Arabic?  Things 
like that are where D especially shines, because of its better string 
handling.  All the different protocols are handled with lots of text.... 
programming a server in D is so much cleaner and simpler.

But again, you can still use it on both server and client sides.

On the server side, I've used it for audio file processing (on a website 
where you design your own ringtone; scripted languages couldn't do the 
processing at any reasonable speed), for service monitoring, and for 
daemons (e.g. basic chat servers, where persistent connections are 
significantly better than HTTP.)

On the client side, I've done less, but I've written a few command line 
tools for my own usage.  You can write shell extensions in D, for 
example (Windows.)  Or what some would write as shell scripts (Linux.) 
Drivers might be written in D, too, although I've not done that.

Still, for writing GUI apps, D isn't yet in a good place, you're right. 
  But, there are toolkits available and you can always use libraries 
available in C.

Also; why should there be a single GUI toolkit?  Do you also wish that 
there was a single phone company?

I use D mostly during my free time and for my convenience at work. 
However, I have written software for clients in D that was used in their 
backend.  I've also bid out several requests that would require some 
heavier lifting than slower languages can usually managed, but those 
clients have - so far - not gone through with it.

Thanks,
-[Unknown]


> The language itself seems to be very interesting. Unfortunately, there 
> does not seem to be a single complete and stable GUI toolkit, which is a 
> real show stopper - since I can only imagine using D for small GUI 
> client apps on the desktop right now (where it beats Java and C# easily 
> since it compiles directly to native code and links everything in 
> statically - no giant framework download required).
> 
> On the server side, it is impratical to not use Apache or IIS to host 
> your applications, since most firewalls block anything but port 80, and 
> most servers also host web content.
> 
> So if you cannot use it on the server side nor on the client side, what 
> is it useful for?
> 
> Does anyone here use it commercially or do you only toy around with it 
> in your spare time?