Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[Aldo]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 07:35:05 UTC, Tofu Kaitlyn wrote:
> [...]
>
> I duno... what do yall think? Is D going to somehow explode in 
> popularity in 5-10 years? Am I missing some part of the 
> picture? Or am I right and if so what can be done about it?

Hello,

I'm using D since 2015. I will try to share my view of it as a 
simple "back-end web dev". For me, D has not failed at all. It 
improved a lot since my first hello world, but it still need a 
lot of work.

I remember using it before 2015, it was just a total mess. Today 
i'm happy to use it everyday at home and I try to push it at work 
(but it's not easy when everybody think Go or Rust are the best 
incoming programming languages...).

What I like about D:

- Easy and fast installation
- Fast compilation
- Beautiful syntax
- Base performance is great (dmd with gc) when you don't work on 
AAA games
- DUB works nicely for me

What I dont like about D:

[Esthetical part]
- Keyword naming. We really need to do something about small 
things like that. I don't like the fact that we have a "@" before 
a keyword and sometimes not.

- File naming. Why are we using filenameslikethat.d ? It's just 
ugly. Just go with something as simple as file_name.d. Again I 
understand that for you it's not a real problem and it's not top 
priority(and you are right), but trust me it just seems ugly when 
you come from another language.

[Others]
- Every time I try to read the source code of the std on github, 
I close the browser tab after 5 seconds. I'm trying to find the 
body of a simple function, and I need to find it and try to 
understand how it works in a +10000 lines source file.

I think the best improvement would be to separate tests and the 
real code. Sometimes I check the source code of the Go std, and 
honestly it's just 200x cleaner. It's so easy to read even for 
users like me. In D we have 50 lines of doc, 10 lines of code, 50 
lines of tests. It's too much and people are doing the same 
mistake in their projects.

- Static lib. Always a linker error with coff/omf (I don't even 
know what it means) and a conversion is needed. I always give up 
and go with derelict.

- When I try to build a simple hello world with vibe, I have this 
fuc**** linker error that pop out on windows. This one is really 
unacceptable, I don't know how to fix this myself guys, but i'm 
sure one of you can. Just do it please. How are we supposed to 
spread Dlang when new users have to deal with things like that 
for a simple hello world ?



I still believe in this language and will continue to use it. But 
we really need to keep improving it (and I will try to help as 
well even if I don't have the required skills). My goal is to 
release a game with it on steam platform, and I think it's 
totally doable today.

Thanks for all the efforts you put in the language.