Interesting Observation from JAXLondon

[Russel Winder]

On Sun, 2018-10-21 at 05:47 +0000, Joakim via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> […]
> 
> Simple, C++ is increasingly seen as irrelevant by those choosing 
> a new language, so D's real competition is now Go, Rust, Swift, 
> Nim, Zig, etc. These are people who want to write "fast code 
> fast," well except for Rust users, who value ownership more.

Don't try telling the C++ crowd this. :-)

Go, Rust, and Python are the languages of the moment – well apart from
Kotlin and Java obviously. Swift has, at least for now, missed the
"widely used" boat but is the language of choice on iOS. Languages such
as Nim, Pony, etc. are likely to remain niche languages. Perhaps this
is the role for D? 

> Also, D can pitch itself to Java/C# users who need more 
> performance with that softer pitch, because many of them have 
> been burned by C++ and would recoil if you made the explicit C++ 
> comparison. It is well-known that Rust and Go are attracting 
> users from the Java and scripting communities, D needs to attract 
> them too, as the Tilix dev noted to me last year:

Not sure about C#, which is claiming a resurgence just now, but the
Java/Kotlin/Groovy world currently has a problem: The Cloud. The way
cloud services people are charging, and the really quite small now but
nonetheless significant wake up time for the JVM, has lead to many
large players re-assessing their use of the JVM, and they are switching
to Go. This is mostly because Go has presence and midshare via Docker.

Sadly I am not sure D is in a position to get traction in this milieu
because no-one in the JVM-based community has ever heard of it. Compare
this to Go and to a great extent Rust, and D has missed the boat. I get
the feeling (but have no inside knowledge) that one of the main reasons
for Kotlin/Native was to allow people to evolve their JVM codes to
native using a familiar JVM-based programming language. So I suspect
the "battle" to be between Go and Kotlin/Native as the JVM-based world
comes to terms with the new Cloud pricing models.

C++ isn't even a minor player. JNI is a barrier for C, let alone C++.

Of course GraalVM may change the game replacing HotSpot, J9, etc.

[…]
> I tend to get more annoyed about the negativity in the forums 
> with regards to GC. I do feel that sometimes people get so 
> wrapped up in what D needs for it to be a perfect systems 
> language (i.e. no GC, memory safety, etc.), it gets overlooked 
> that it is a very good language for building native applications 
> as it is now. While D is often compared to Rust, in some ways the 
> comparison to Go is more interesting to me. Both are GC-based 
> languages and both started as systems languages, however Go 
> pivoted and doubled down on the GC and has seen success. One of 
> the Red Hat products I support, OpenShift, leverages Kubernetes 
> (a Google project) for container orchestration and it’s written 
> in Go.

Ditto. A GC language should be proud of its GC. Go is. But then they
are on their third and likely soon fourth GC. Java GCs have also
evolved quite dramatically, and improved massively. D is a GC language
and yet no-one goes around saying what a great GC D has. Everyone just
grumbles about it, or tries to remove it.

> I think D as a language is far superior to Go, and I wish we 
> would toot our horn a little more in this regard instead of the 
> constant negative discussion around systems programming."
> https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/11/on-tilix-and-d-an-interview-with-gerald-nunn/

Sadly this marketing and traction of D debate happens from time to time
on this mailing lists, but the community attitude seems not to change.
Tilix shows what can be done with D/GtkD. I switched GFontBrowser to D
from C++, but may yet rewrite in Rust with gtk-rs because the Rust/gtk-
rs community is looking to get traction where D seems happy as a small
niche – for me a sad waste.

As for Qt and wxWidgets to go for real traction against Go and Rust, I
have moaned a few minutes ago about that in another email so will avoid
repetition here.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

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