More Linux love?

[Tyler Jameson Little]

> But the later seems to be the same as it was. Yeah, DMD can 
> generate x86_64 nowadays which I remember was a long time 
> pending issue some while back and I can find `gdc` in the 
> Ubuntu repository, which is huge improvement, but overall the 
> impression is the same: D is Windows-centric.
>
> It seems to me that because historically D was Windows-centric, 
> because Walter is Windows user, for all this years Windows 
> developers had easier time when playing with D, than Linux 
> devs. And after all this years, D community is mostly 
> Windows-centric. Have anyone did any poll regarding this? I am 
> guessing, I may be wrong.
>
> Each time I fell the urge to play with D in the free time and 
> want to test newest, coolest features and projects written in 
> D, I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library 
> incompatibilities, path incompatibilities. I toy with a lot of 
> languages and I never hit issues like this with eg. Rust or Go, 
> which fall into similar category of programming languages. Both 
> of them seem to be developed for Linux/Unix - first, Windows 
> later.

Well, there's at least a significant chunk of the community on 
Linux, judging by the LDC and GDC projects. I haven't had any 
major problems on Linux (I use Arch Linux), and DMD gets regular 
testing on Linux: http://d.puremagic.com/test-results/ (it even 
gets tested on FreeBSD =D). LDC's CI (travis-ci) only supports 
Linux, and Windows support is in an alpha state.

A while ago I tried D on Windows and it wasn't nearly as nice as 
running on Linux. I don't use very many libraries (just some C 
bindings) and my projects aren't very complicated, so perhaps I 
haven't gotten to the point you're describing.

> So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers: 
> please install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe 
> Fedora too and see for yourself is your project is easy to 
> install and working each time you release it.

I can agree with this, but there also aren't very many 
high-profile D libraries. Most developers seem to write something 
to scratch their own itch, and kudos if it happens to work for 
you.

I would like to see a stronger library management solution, but 
there currently isn't a "standard" build tool (except maybe DSSS, 
but it seems abandoned). There's also dub 
(https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/dub), which looks promising 
or orbit (https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit). Maybe the 
community will settle on one and this problem will magically go 
away?

> In my opinion in the last 15 years most of the noticeable, long 
> lasting programming software improvements came from Linux/Mac 
> world (Unix, generally speaking), but I am biased. But the fact 
> is: Open Source and Linux is where young, eager to learn and 
> risk devs and cool kids are. In great numbers. Embrace them, 
> just like Open, Collaborative development model and you'll 
> quickly see a lot of new cool projects, developers, bug fixes 
> and buzz. :)

I agree, but this also depends on your target market. For 
Windows, I guess you've forgotten .NET?

A lot of the D community came from C++, and AFAICT Windows nearly 
dominates the commercial C++ market. All those C++ developers who 
got tired of C++'s warts came to D. Many other languages (Go, 
Ruby, Python, etc) are developed for users coming from C, Perl 
and Java, which have traditionally been *nix or cross-platform, 
so naturally development would happen on the platform they know 
better.

That being said, D has pretty strong Linux support, and from what 
I've seen in the community, even the Windows users have a pretty 
solid knowledge of Linux; moreso than many other open-source 
programming language projects (many are ignorant of everything 
Windows).

Personally, I think it's refreshing to have such strong Windows 
support, so when I need to make my project work on Windows, I 
know there's solid support in the community. Moving a node.js app 
from Linux to Windows was a bug-riddled experience because many 
of the libs didn't have proper Windows support (paths were just 
the tip of the iceburg).

> PS. Kudos for whole D community, the language is even better 
> and more impressive then it used to be.

I'm in a similar boat. I come back to the D community every few 
months and check back, and each time I run into less and less 
problems. There are still a lot of annoying things (CTFE, the 
garbage collector, no package manager), but these seem to be 
under pretty heavy development.

Anyway, with the last couple of releases, I now feel comfortable 
recommending D to my friends. If D had a nice, stupid-simple 
build process (like Go's), then I may even become a fanboy. =D