Where will D be in 2015 in the programming language ecosphere?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff154f88ccde5b99a63396 at news.digitalmars.com...
> Hello Walter,
>
>> BCS wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe someone should make a DMD-EE ("embedded edition") with a truly
>>> minimal runtime and library along with a compiler patched to support
>>> it (e.g. no GC, no AA's, no hidden memory allocations, no new/delete,
>>> D-ified versions of the c std lib). The DMD patch shouldn't be to
>>> hard, the runtime would mostly amount to dropping stuff and the lib
>>> would mostly just copy some stuff from phobos and wrapping, porting
>>> or binding (depending on what's more reasonable) stuff from C.
>>>
>>> I'd offer to do it but I have almost no experience in any of those.
>>>
>> There's not a whole lot of point to do this, other than checking a
>> box, because embedded systems developers have no problem doing this
>> themselves (create a custom runtime library).
>>
>
> It would lower the barrier to entry. While not to important once someone 
> has chosen D, I would think it would be much more important when they are 
> just considering it.
>

Exactly. D is enormously better than C for many such things, but C/C++ have 
so much inertia in all the fields C/C++ are used that regardless of how much 
better D is, barrier to entry and overcoming C/C++'s inertia is still going 
to be a significant issue for D. We want it to be as easy as possible for 
potential D users in any field appropriate for D to try it out. Then they 
can customize it further if they really need to, but the real issue is 
getting them to decide to use it in the first place, and I'd be very 
surprised if a lot of them would be willing to do *all* of the necessary 
adjustments merely to test drive it. Plus, there's embedded homebrew too, 
and the homebrewers aren't likely to have a lot of time to do the necessary 
adjustments.