D and the world

[David B. Held]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> [...]
> That said, there will always be that 5% of code that really really needs 
> the maximum performance the machine can deliver.  I'd definitely rather 
> write that in D than Fortran, C, or C++.

I think this number is much bigger than 5%.  Consider that much of PC 
advancement has come at the hands of gamers, and gamers demand the kind 
of performance that will never be delivered by a VM.  Whereas pr0n just 
drives video playback performance, games drive everything from display 
rendering to physics simulation to network performance, which is why 
games are written almost exclusively in C and C++ and comprise about a 
$10 billion/year industry.  If you also consider that scientific and 
large-scale apps are almost never written on top of a VM, you are "just 
left" with mid- to low-end business and consumer apps.  That's still a 
sizable chunk of the market, but by no means 95%.  People have been 
predicting the demise of C++ almost since the beginning of Java, and 
yet, a decade later, it is still one of the top two languages in the 
world, even though Java has much better tool support and a vast army of 
programmers.

If D captured the video game market, that would be a total coup from a 
PL perspective.  I think that would be a pretty nifty target, but would 
require a huge investment in the toolchain.

Dave