Why we chose not to use D for our Linux project

[Simen Haugen]

"Bill Lear" <rael at zopyra.com> wrote in message 
news:g0sa4j$2fmf$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Sadly, we have given up on using D for our Linux project, despite my hopes 
> and favorable overall impression of the D language.  I thought I would 
> share briefly our reasons in hopes that the information is useful to those 
> in the D community.
>
> We are writing a distributed media publishing system that uses a 
> relational database to store media programming schedules and other related 
> information.  We need a language that has a library that provides easy 
> database access (something along the lines of Perl's DBI, for example), 
> CGI programming support, access to system-level routines, reasonable 
> performance, YAML support, and other features.
>
> We came to a quick conclusion that D wasn't going to work, as the DBI code 
> proffered on dsource has apparently been abandoned and does not come close 
> to compiling with the current dmd (1.028 or 1.029) compiler.  We had a 
> laborious run-around trying to figure out if DBI requires Tango or Phobos, 
> wrestled with the "bud" make-ish system, and finally gave up in 
> disgust --- it just wasn't going to work without serious effort.

I certainly see you're point. I'm still using 1.028 and compile dbi with few 
changes to the source code, but I still encounter some obscure bugs that 
needs workarounds. And I havent got dbi to work with the build tools, so I'm 
building manually. Still, D 1.0 is not very old so I don't think you can 
expect a load of mature libraries. It would have been great if some 
companies would support D though. I'm an open source enthousiast, but until 
there are good enough open source libraries I would gladly spend some money 
on commercial ones if any existed :)


> We settled on ruby, after spending a short time installing the necessary 
> components, coding up test routines, and deciding it fit the bill.
>
> The sad thing is that D looks very promising, but the future for it does 
> not, I'm afraid, unless the D community can produce a coherent set of 
> tools that are used in the real world and that can be installed without 
> developers being burdened with trying to figure out arcane install 
> problems, incompatibility issues, and the like.  With ruby, we had just a 
> few easy commands to run to install DBI and it was up and running, and we 
> have had no problems with it since.
>
> I told our CTO that maybe in a year or two D would have a stable set of 
> libraries and support systems in place that could be considered, but we'll 
> be long past choosing D at that point.
>
> I think some serious attention needs to be focused on this, rather than 
> the minutiae of the latest cool language feature.  I have been following D 
> for some years now, hoping it would all come together --- and I hope it 
> does, soon --- as it feels D is being left in the dust.
>

Yeah. Even if D2 is very exiting, I think the focus should be on D1 and 
building a stable base of libraries. But as someone else mentioned here, 
most libraries are one man efforts and thus have the tendency to get 
abandoned when they loose interest or when the library works for their 
purpose.

But I don't agree with the future of D looking pale. I have been using D for 
various projects since it hit the 1 mark, and it works well even if it has 
its quirks (the libraries being the main reason. I've switched UI several 
times, switched to tango, debugged almost every library I've tuched etc...). 
I'm actually very glad I found D as I've found the complexity of C++ a bit 
daunting in the past.