Phobo's migration

[Meta via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 23 June 2016 at 17:24:23 UTC, Joerg Joergonson wrote:
> So, 10 companies are using phobos!! That's amazing, sure shows 
> how great it is! I wonder if they use use import std.stdio; or 
> actually USE phobos.
>
> Phobos clearly is hacked together shit... maybe not all, but at 
> least some.

This is the result of many different people doing small 
incremental changes over time, and I think it's fairly normal for 
a quickly growing OSS project like D. Yes, you can argue over 
whether D is "quickly growing" or not, but it cannot be denied 
that the D community has grown much larger than it was even 2 
years ago.

A lot of the Java standard library is a hacked-together, 
inconsistent mish-mash as well, and it's going to be like that 
forever because of strict backward-compatibility requirements. 
That doesn't stop Java from being the most-used language on the 
planet. D will get there eventually but these things take time 
and initiative, especially without a large financial backer like 
Oracle.


> Yes, .NET has MS behind it. But since you haven't used it you 
> have no clue how well designed it is.  D and phobo's will never 
> achieve millions of lines of code apps because it can't handle 
> it. Hence, most apps in D are 10's of thousands of lines at 
> most. They tend to be simple, more utility or special purpose 
> apps, a few games, or just apps that don't require much effort.

Weka.io was mentioned in this thread, and if I recall correctly 
at DConf 2016 Liran said that their codebase is roughly 200k 
lines. It's not in the millions yet, but it's certainly more than 
a toy project. I'm guessing Sociomantic's codebase is similar in 
size if not larger.

> Their is a fundamental reason why D hasn't taken off, given 
> that the language design itself is better than C\C++(which is 
> why almost all of us are here).

The fundamental reason that D hasn't taken off yet is money, 
plain and simple.


> If D had a better tooling, a truly STANDARD library, an IDE, a 
> GUI lib, etc all on par with it's language capabilities, 
> probably the only people not using D in this world would be 
> Bruce Jenner... and that's only because he's spending all his 
> time trying to find his penis.

Has D recently become popular on 4chan or something? Why bother 
making a stupid dick joke other than to stir shit up?

> At some point, The D "community" has to get it's shit together 
> and start making real decisions about how to proceed in to the 
> future. That requires tough decisions and real work... it 
> requires someone with a visions, until then everything will 
> just be cobbled together... and at some point will fall apart.

Lurk more and you'll see that Walter and Andrei *are* making 
those tough decisions. Not just the small stuff like 
auto-decoding but big decisions like focusing on improving the 
@nogc experience and C++ integration. Nobody here is paid to do 
anything so one is limited in their ability to steer the ship. 
That may change in the future but for now that's how it is.

> Why do you not see the blatant discrepancy between the D 
> language and everything else about D? Do you think that 
> everything else is truly up to par with the language? What use 
> is a the fastest engine in the world if it takes a certain 
> special fuel that no one has invented yet? (It has a ton of use 
> but we have to stop putting gasoline in it and invent the fuel 
> it needs to work optimally)

It'll get there eventually. Time and money are the magic words. 
D's had time, and now it looks like the money will gradually 
start to flow. Give it 2 more years and if things go smoothly, we 
could be an order of magnitude or more above where we are now. 
Sola dea fatum novit.