Red Hat's issues in considering the D language

[Kagamin via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 22 December 2016 at 12:15:06 UTC, Matthias Klumpp 
wrote:
> But the much more important point for us is support and 
> maintainability. The reference compiler will have a much bigger 
> development team and higher focus of attention.

Bugs in frontend, phobos and most of druntime currently go to DMD 
team. Bugs in LLVM backend go to LLVM team. The bug you had with 
atomicOp was trivial and was fixed in a day.

> Additionally, people learning D will told "use DMD" and won't 
> find it in their distribution, which is annoying for them (they 
> think D isn't well supported, while our LDC/GDC packages are 
> less used).

That recommendation is probably already a mistake. One reason to 
recommend dmd is that it's recent, but this implies installation 
of the recent version; if people use packaged version, the 
recommendation is moot (and they again suffer from old docs and 
libs). Another reason is compilation speed and some people see it 
important, so to stop dmd recommendation you also need to kill 
dmd for good else it will still have speed advantage.

>> Confusing claim that he can't use dmd given that he says he 
>> uses it.
>
> Huh? Where is this stated?

> DMD being non-free also makes it incredibly hard to sell D in 
> the FLOSS community. Because of that, I can not actually test 
> my code with dmd
> which means that I don't benefit from improvements done in 
> druntime, Phobos and other parts of D as quickly as others
(You don't benefit from recent improvements because you use a 
packaged version)
> When using dmd this is not an issue, since dmd is very fast
Ah, I probably misunderstood this as if you use dmd.