D on quora ...

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Saturday, 14 October 2017 at 22:43:33 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On 10/7/17 14:08, Laeeth Isharc wrote:

>>
>> In a polyglot environment, D's code generation and 
>> introspection
>> abilities might be quite valuable if it allows you to write 
>> core
>> building blocks once and call them from other languages 
>> without too much
>> boilerplate and bloat.  One could use SWIG, but...
>
> Oh dear, I seem to have accidentally set off a firestorm.
>
> Personally, I think there are better places to focus our energy 
> than worrying about what the users of other languages think. We 
> like D, that should be enough for us. The last line was 
> somewhat tongue-in-cheek. There is no way we're going to 
> convert C#/Java users either, and unlike C/C++ we cannot easily 
> inter-operate with them.

If we can convert Pascal users, why won't some C# and Java 
programmers be receptive to D?  Plenty of people have approached 
D from Java:

https://dlang.org/blog/2017/09/06/the-evolution-of-the-accessors-library/
https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/11/on-tilix-and-d-an-interview-with-gerald-nunn/
https://github.com/intellij-dlanguage/intellij-dlanguage/
(Kingsley came from Java).

Why can't we easily interop with Java and C#?  I didn't find 
interop with Java so bad for what I was doing (embedding a Java 
library via the JVM with callbacks to D code), and Andy Smith 
found similar.

http://dconf.org/2015/talks/smith.pdf
(towards the end)

C# interop for what I am doing sees easy enough.  (I will 
generate C# wrappers for D structs and functions/methods).

This work wasn't open-sourced, and nor did Microsoft send out a 
press release about their use of D in the COM team.  But I spoke 
to the author in Berlin (maybe you did too), and it wasn't so 
much work to make it useful:

http://www.lunesu.com/uploads/ModernCOMProgramminginD.pdf


> Instead of worrying about how to get more people to come from a 
> specific language. People will come if they see an advantage in 
> D so lets try to provide as many advantages as possible. :)

Yes - agree with this.