What is D?

[Mark Rousell]

On 09/04/2019 01:07, Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> IMO, Rust's only feature is the borrow checker; the rest of the
> language stinks.  But, statically-checked memory safety is so
> fantastic Rust is destined for success.  If D had an equally effective
> mechanism for memory safety and fearless concurrency, there would be
> no reason for Rust to exist, and there would be no competition for D.

It seems to me that Rust's real killer feature is that it is backed by
Mozilla. How many major modern languages are really successful without
major corporate backing? C# has Microsoft, Java had Sun/has Oracle[1],
Javascript had Netscape (when Netscape mattered) as well as browser
support from Microsoft (when that mattered), Go has Google, Swift has
Apple. In comparison, D does not have big name backing (sorry, no
offence intended!).

(I should add that I think that C and C++ are exceptions to this since
they have, in comparison, been around for much longer and were able to
get up a head of steam in their own standards-driven right before
corporate backing came to matter in the same way that it seems to now).

And so even if D had the same (or better) features than Rust or Go, it
would still face competitors.

Thus it seems to me that technical improvements such as adding features
to D to improve its concurrency and memory safety are certainly
important, as I understand it, but *marketing* is important too. Is it
possible that some major project with the profile of Firefox could be
(partly) moved to D from C++?




( A bit about me: This is my first post here and I am not currently a D
programmer. I joined this mail list to learn a bit more about D. I am
currently working on a cross platform thick client application project
in C# (yes, thick client app projects still exist). It is possible that
future versions of this project could be written in one of Rust, D or
Go, depending on how each language develops including issues like
readability, wasm support, asynch/concurrency support, and cross
platform GUI support ).




Footnote:-
1: Luckily for Java, it had already built up a head of steam in its own
right before Oracle came along.

-- 
Mark Rousell
 
 
 

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