D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, September 3, 2018 11:15:03 AM MDT Laurent Tréguier via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> It just baffles me a bit to see the state of D in this
> department, when languages like Go or Rust (hooray for yet
> another comparison to Go and Rust) are a lot younger, but already
> have what looks like very good tooling.
> Then again they do have major industry players backing them
> though...

The dynamics are fundamentally different when you're paying someone to work
on something. As I understand it, in addition to whatever volunteer work is
done, Google and Mozilla pay people to work on those languages. And when
you're doing that, it's trivial enough to say that you think that something
matters enough to pay someone to work on it even if it's not something that
anyone contributing actually wants to do or really cares about having for
themselves. Relatively little time has been spent contributing to D by
people who are paid to work on it. Even if both Walter and Andrei agreed
that something should be treated as top priority, aside from paying someone
to work on it through the D Foundation, they really can't make anyone work
on it. What gets done is usually what the contributors care about. That's
one reason why donations could end up being a game changer over time. It
makes it possible to pay someone to do something that no contributors want
to spend their free time doing.

- Jonathan M Davis