Marketing D [ was Re: GCC 4.6 ]

[retard]

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:12:04 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> Russel Winder wrote:
>> I appreciate this is going off topic somewhat for the list, never mind
>> the original posting, but I think summarizing this issue should be
>> constructive -- albeit me seemingly acting as Devil's Advocate.  (NB
>> This is not a troll, for me these are serious issues -- I am a
>> consultant and therefore whilst I do no significant development on big
>> projects, I advise influencers and decision makers.)
>> 
>> The marketing problem for D, at least as it impinges on me, is that it
>> is "Walter's language with Andrei helping out".  No matter that this
>> may be an unfair and incorrect representation of reality overall, it is
>> nonetheless what the project management and CTO/CIO community perceive
>> of D, if they have heard of it at all.
> 
> Most (all?) languages have one or two prime designers behind it. What
> mystifies me is why this is considered a bad thing for D.

It's considered a bad thing when the users disagree with the design 
decisions. Those who have faith in the language continue to criticize / 
rant / provide patches and wish it would improve. Others just leave the 
sinking ship.

> (Perl, Python, Ruby, have only one implementation.)

Is this a joke?

>> D is perceived as a collection of "one-man band" bits with a few
>> hangers-on.  In this light, there is no way for D to have any traction,
>> even if it is technically a better language than any of the actual
>> competition.
> 
> Yet other successful languages follow this same model. Why is it bad for
> D? I suspect it really is some other issue.

I've never gotten the impression that e.g. JavaScript/PHP/Python/Ruby/
Scala/Haskell were one man bands. C++ used to be a one man project, but 
now there's the committee. ISO/ANSI standards rarely are one man projects.


>> 2.  The project goes fully open source with a core of 5 or 6 people,
>> supported by employers or via some form of sponsorship, actively
>> working nigh on full time to ramp up on the productization of the
>> end-to-end toolchain and library support -- so all of IDE support Qt,
>> GTK libraries, etc. -- and gets some seriously high-profile projects
>> using D.
> 
> D is fully open source.

DMD has a non open source backend ( http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd ), 
but the D language is of course open. There aren't many "closed source" 
languages out there.

It would help if that backend was completely abandoned and something like 
LLVM was used instead. DMD and LDC teams could join their forces and 
implement something much faster. The other LLVM developers independently 
improve the backend optimizations.