D future ...

[Dibyendu Majumdar via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 20 December 2016 at 12:43:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 12/20/16 3:41 AM, Benjiro wrote:
>> [snip]
>
> Thanks for the rant. Though it was pretty awesome, I too feel 
> the focus was missing in the sense that I'm unclear on what 
> steps we can take to alleviate your pain points. Do you want 
> more or less in the language and the standard library? Do you 
> want me to get on things like editor integration I have no 
> expertise in?

Hi,

As a long time D observer and someone who tried to use D earlier 
this year, I hope following is constructive.

D's reason for existence
------------------------

I think the landscape of programming languages has changed 
somewhat in recent years - we have new languages like Go, Swift, 
Rust, and even an existing language like C# is becoming cross 
platform. It seems that D started out as better C++ but C++ is 
also evolving and taking many of the ideas from D.

So I think that D has to have a clear charter similar to say the 
charter for C 
(http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2021.htm).

And this needs to clarify how D is different from its competition 
and which use cases it is best for.

Is it better C?
Is it better C++?
Is it better some other language?

Project Management
---------------------

It is a bit painful to watch how D's development is managed. In 
my view, the whole of the D team (including volunteers) need to 
be very narrowly focussed on very small set of defined priorities.

Secondly the goal has to be a measurable delivery within strict 
timescales.

It seems that too many avenues are being chased while there are 
too few people to handle the workload. Why not have a much more 
restricted scope and focus everyone on that. And when this is 
achieved move to the next scope.

It is also important to keep the scope small and achievable in a 
short time (3-6 months).

Real world needs
-----------------

As a potential user of D, here are the things I looked at:

1) Can I successfully build my project?

2) Can I expose my D modules as reusable C ABI compatible shared 
libraries for use in a heterogenous environment?

3) Can I debug my programs easily?

4) Is there an IDE I can use for development?

5) Is the performance going to match C or C++?

6) Will the third party libraries I need to use work with D?

Note that in all of above, language features and D libraries did 
not count! In production usage being able to deliver counts most. 
D fell short in these areas compared to a combination of C++ and 
C#.

Final thoughts
--------------

I wish I could help, as I really like D as a language. But 
unfortunately I have to focus on getting my own work done 
(survival reasons), and I chose to use C++ and C# for my project 
(after giving up the idea of using D).

I could potentially help in project management in my spare time 
... but feel that it needs a mind set change in the D team ... 
and I fear this is unlikely.

Apologies for being one of those who offers advice but no action.


Regards
Dibyendu