The proper case for D.

[Steve Teale]

Can this group come up with a proper, sober (OK, I'm not), case for D.

This would clearly have to steer clear of the standard libraries, I can't see how any outside observer is going to be impressed by the fact that we have two.

And D is a computer programming language. So we should deal with it as that first.

Andrei's article had a lot of good points primarily revolving around the need to concentrate on concurrency, but I suspect that we should probably stress the basics.

When Bjarne Stroustrup was originally promoting C++, he made a strong point that you could at least consider it to be a 'better C'. This point, it seemed to me, was lost on many. Now we are looking for radical arguments as to why D is a cool language. Maybe we should remember the basics, and concentrate less on the vapor.

Bearophile made a counter-argument. But this also did not stress our basic weaknesses. Most of us are using DMD, which on Windows uses a 20 year old linker, and utilizes an antique object file format. Under Linux, it can't produce the position-independent code that's required to create reliable shared libraries.

Unless you use alpha-level code, you can't load arbitrary D modules at run-time.

There isn't a decent debugger for either Windows or Linux. There may never be one if the potential authors see the constant focus on meta-programming - that must make life hell for them.

I'm not advocating a return to D1, but I do want to see closure on D2, and an ascent from the constant alpha state. Then after that, I'd like to see a more formal system of RFCs for library proposals, and a recognized pattern for voting on them so that anyone who kept up-to-date with the process would not be surprised by what suddenly appeared in Phobos, or perhaps it should be the D Standard Library (DSL).

When all that had happened I could forget computer programming and get on with my woodwork relatively secure in the knowledge that I had chosen to support a winner, and the Walter's efforts were not in vain.