D easily overlooked?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 14 July 2017 at 09:29:27 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> On Friday, 14 July 2017 at 09:02:58 UTC, Stefan Koch wrote:
>> The beauty of D lies in it's holistic approach.
>>
>> The one unique feature to point out would be CTFE which is not 
>> to be found in other compiled langauges.
>>
>> constexpr does not even come close since it cannot return 
>> literals :0
>
>
> CTFE is indeed unique but is it a selling point where people 
> will talk about. Something that they will experience in there 
> daily life and say, i can not live without that?

Yes, D's compile-time regex are still the fastest in the world.  
I've been benching it recently for a marketing-oriented blog post 
I'm preparing for the official D blog, std.regex beats out the 
top C and Rust entries from the benchmarks game on linux/x64 with 
a single core:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/regexredux.html
https://github.com/joakim-noah/regex-bench

D comes in third on Android/ARM, but not far behind, suggesting 
it would still be third on that list if run with a bunch of other 
languages on mobile.  Dmitry thinks it might be alignment issues, 
the bane of cross-platform, high-performance code on ARM, as he 
hasn't optimized his regex code for ARM.

> Its part marketing, part unique features, part giving people 
> confidence by having a big name attached to it. A lot of 
> languages really are so much the same ( fast compiling, single 
> deployment, multi platform, ... ), that it becomes harder to 
> stand out with features that the end user cares about.
>
> Recently been doing a bit of Pascal programming. Ultra fast 
> compiler, low memory usage ( No GC ), cross compiler with 
> massive platforms support, there own cross platform GUI ( 
> Lazarus ). And yet they have the same issue. Pascal does not 
> stand out despite being a mature and easy fast, efficient 
> language. But it did get included in that article ;)
>
> D is technically C++ replacement and yet, C++ has been losing 
> massive market shares but D has not been enjoying much from 
> that loss.
>
> Frankly, i am also a bit lost of ideas as to what can D stand 
> out. Its almost like D is going to Pascal route. People use it, 
> it great, but beyond the core audience, its hard to reach out 
> to others.

The pitch is that you can write very fast code quickly and 
easily, and make it the fastest in the world if you spend some 
time profiling and optimizing.  At the end, you'll have code that 
you can actually read easily and aren't scared to modify because 
you're not sure you understand how it works.  And all this 
without struggling with C's primitive features or Rust's borrow 
checker.

Is the dream fulfilled?  No, D still has plenty of rough edges 
and gaping holes:

https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17630

But with tech nowadays, you need a good foundational design 
before all else.  Yes, someone else may get out of the gate 
faster with the bicycle they built out of spare parts, but once 
you get the Millenium Falcon going, it will blast by them. ;)