At a crossroad

[Sjoerd van Leent]

Lately, I've been tuning in to the development of D again. But what I see is rather disturbing.

There is a new continuation of the old D, in the newer D2. Personally, I think this is good, as long as there will be a defined end to D2. What disturbs me more, is that there appears to be no coherent development.

There are all nice ideas, but it appears that one project dies after the other.

I see a number of problems, which keep D from growing up.

There appears to be a lack of understanding about whom are going to use the language. D is targeted at the niche of C and C++. Next to D, there are .NET and Java. These are all competitors. Other popular languages, such as Python and Ruby, though being non-system languages, have their share as well. As I look at it, I come to some essential conclusions:

All of these environments have a stable language, and on top of that, ONE single main library. With C++ this is STL/IOStream, with .NET and Java it's their respective libraries. Similar for Python and Ruby. With D however, there are at least 2 main libraries (Phobos and Tango), whereof Tango doesn't support D2. It is unacceptable for the target audience to find this situation. Tools can't interoperate, libraries can't interoperate, etc.

There are a lot of ideas for nice tools. But the essential base is missing. For large projects there is the need for a decent IDE and the need for dynamic linking. Although attempts are made, it all appears to stall. There is barely any usable main-purpose library.

As D2 will be finished hopefully not to long from now, especially the specification, I would really request to start thinking about how to continue. D is a nice language, with great opportunity. But without management, even when it is nice, it will fail.

I would like to ask everyone interested in getting D up and running for main-stream purposes, to sit together and think about solutions.

Anyway, I hope I'm not putting too much poison into the newsgroup, but I really needed to say this.