D needs to get its shit together!

[Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 11:50:20 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:

>
> I am already far into my project with D but at the same time i 
> can not help getting this nagging feeling that D has major 
> issues beyond its base language. Mostly its community and 
> structure. I see less of this with for instance Rust despite 
> being a WAY younger language and audience. Its almost like D is 
> stuck in the past, in some kind of pre-2000 C++ attitude. Like 
> i said, maybe its me. D as a base language works but for such a 
> old language ( lets be honest about that ), its a real struggle 
> on the other areas beyond the language.

We don't notice the rivers carving the canyons in our brief 
lifespans, so would never know that it happened without some 
point of reference in the past to compare to. While D's progress 
doesn't move at such a glacial pace (thankfully!), it still won't 
be very noticeable to someone who hasn't been around here long 
enough. If you could move your point of reference back in time a 
bit, you'd know that a great deal of progress has been made.

That doesn't mean that such complaints aren't valid and shouldn't 
be raised, but it's nice to have some perspective to moderate 
your expectations. Progress *is* being made. The volunteer 
argument keeps coming up because that *is* the reality. There's 
no one around here who can snap their fingers and get a team of 
people to put their heads down and make improvements on a daily 
basis. Rust and Go, however, do have that benefit. So we move 
forward, bit-by-bit, slowly but surely.

I've been using D and coming to these forums since 2003 (and, by 
the way, using DMD on Windows without a hitch for all that time) 
and I can point to many periods in the intervening years when we 
passed major milestones. There used to be no IDE plugins at all. 
No installers. DMD was distributed in a single zip for all 
platforms. We had no build tools, no DUB, no web frameworks, a 
substandard standard library, a clunky web interface for the 
newsgroups... So please, don't take your snapshot view of the 
current state of affairs and take that as evidence that the 
rivers aren't carving the canyons, because they very much are.