Moving back to .NET

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 11:56:58 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 11:34:51 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> in D. Then again, I don't know how Go and Rust will fare in a 
>> couple of years' time.
>
> I think the C++ people are desperately trying to recapture the 
> application market with some of the things that they propose 
> for C++17/20. I think that market is dying fast for C++. I 
> don't know about Rust, they seem to aim for high level 
> programming. I think both C++ and Rust have too many syntax 
> issues to be convenient for high level applications.
>
> Go I think will do ok for focused web services with not too 
> complicated logic. I don't think they will replace Java. I 
> think Go will take the market where people have been using 
> Java, but not really needed the feature set.

But a language like D that is already very feature rich cannot be 
dragged down to the level of Go anymore. D combines Go and Java, 
although in an incomplete way (as of now).

>> The lines seem to blur over time, because any language is 
>> pretty useless without at least one powerful library to its 
>> name.
>
> Applications benefit from frameworks, and then the desired 
> frameworks dictate the language you use. So growth is difficult 
> in that domain.
>
> But you can implement you application model in an "engine 
> language" and use a javascript framework for the UI with a 
> browser engine in-between then the "engine language" can focus 
> on efficient marshalling between that browser engine and the 
> runtime.
>
> So basically, break up the eco system so that you aren't locked 
> into a small language (like D or Rust).

That's what I've been doing for 2-3 years now thanks to D. I use 
D as the core and everything else is glued onto the D core. D is 
actually pretty good at this. Since it's cross-platform, I can 
use the same code base everywhere. I don't need to worry about 
UIs or the like. On Windows, for example, I can compile the code 
into a dll and expose the functions that are needed. The UI can 
be in Python, Lua or whatever. I'm kinda using D as "C with 
high-level features". This is exactly what brought me to D, not 
having to worry about platforms anymore. Write once, connect to 
anything.