Andrei's list of barriers to D adoption

[Adam Wilson via Digitalmars-d]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its own thread.
> It's very important.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies. Dozens every
> year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D and ask people
> what it would take for them to use the language. Invariably I hear a
> surprisingly small number of reasons:
>
> * The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right
> off.
>
> * Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.
>
> * Safety has holes and bugs.
>
> * Hiring people who know D is a problem.
>
> * Documentation and tutorials are weak.
>
> * There's no web services framework (by this time many folks know of D,
> but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of vibe.d). I
> have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd over one year
> ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough interest.
>
> * (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio plugin, it
> doesn't exist.
>
> * Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
>
> * Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the
> weaknesses above.
>

A note to all on the GC. We have a GSoC project this year for the GC. He 
is currently working on improving the GC code to allow for multiple GC 
implementations and bringing in Rainer's Precise GC on-board. Once he 
has completed the on-boarding he will work on improving the precision of 
the precise GC.

A precise GC is important as it paves the way for 
background/generational/concurrent GC algorithms, such as what you find 
in modern .NET/Java apps. I feel that this will go a *long* towards 
solving the majority of the complaints about the GC, with the exception 
of the "never-GC" crowd.

-- 
// Adam Wilson
// import quiet.dlang.dev;