RFC: reference counted Throwable

[Cliff via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 21 September 2014 at 04:59:12 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 21.09.2014 04:50, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
>> On 9/20/14, 7:10 PM, bearophile wrote:
>>> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>>>
>>>> Rust looked a lot more exciting when I didn't know much 
>>>> about it.
>>>
>>> I didn't remember ever seeing you excited about Rust :-) In 
>>> past you
>>> (rightfully) didn't comment much about Rust. But do you have 
>>> more
>>> defined ideas about it now? Do you still think D has a chance 
>>> against
>>> Rust?
>>
>> I don't think Rust has a chance against D. -- Andrei
>>
>
> The real question is which language, from all that want to 
> replace C++, will eventually get a place at an OS vendors SDK.
>
> So far, the winning ones seem to be Swift on Apple side, and 
> .NET Native-C++/CLX on Microsoft side (who knows what are they 
> doing with M#).
>
> Maybe someone in the commercial UNIX (FOSS is too bound with 
> C), real time or embedded OS space?
>
> --
> Paulo

Interop, interop, interop.  Walter and Andrei are right when they 
talk about the importance of C++ interop - not only do you get to 
leverage those libraries, but it reduces the barrier to entry for 
D in more environments.

Swift will never be more important than Objective C was - which 
is to say it'll be the main development language on Apple 
products and probably nothing else.  That has real value, but the 
limits on it are pretty hard and fast (which says more about 
Apple than the language itself.)

.NET suffers a similar problem in spite of the community's best 
efforts with Mono - it'll always be a distant 2nd (or 5th or 
20th) on other platforms.  And on Windows, C++ won't get 
supplanted by .NET absent a sea-change in the mindset of the 
Windows OS group - which is notoriously resistant to change (and 
they have a colossal existing code base which isn't likely to 
benefit from the kind of inflection point Apple had moving to a 
BSD and porting/rewriting scads of code.)

So C/C++ is it for universal languages, really (outside of the 
web server space, where you have a large Java deployment.)  I 
don't think D needs to be the next .NET (of any flavor) or the 
next Swift, and I don't see as it is being positioned that way 
either - the target to me is clearly C/C++.  It doesn't need to 
compete with languages that have lesser universality, though it 
should (and does) borrow the good ideas from those languages.

I don't think D needs to look at *replacing* C++ in the near or 
mid term either - it still needs to convince people it deserves a 
place at the table.  And the easiest way to do that is to get 
this C++ interop story really nailed down, and make sure D's 
warts are smaller than C++'s.  And, of course, the GC strawman 
that native programmers always claim is more important than it 
really is.  I like the threads going on currently about ARC and 
related technologies - there's a real chance to innovate here.