Could D have fit Microsoft's needs?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 12:12:06AM +0000, Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 July 2019 at 23:49:00 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
> 
> > I think D could meet Microsoft's needs, but only if they forked it
> > and made some fundamental changes to remove the technical debt,
> > remove some of the "weird sh**"
> > (https://youtu.be/TkNep5zHWNw?t=1378), and a number of other things
> > we all could list to make using D a more professional experience.
[...]
> D is unique from Rust and C# in that is scales both up and down.  So,
> Microsoft is missing an opportunity to have one language for all use
> cases.  But I still think D has to do something about the technical
> debt and other "weird sh**" to make it viable.
[...]

Yeah, D has a really beautiful, marvelous core that works really well
and addresses safety concerns, productivity, scalability, and
meta-programming needs.  But outside this core is a bunch of "weird
sh**", as the above video aptly puts it, of poorly-interacting corner
cases, unexpected (often legacy) behaviours, and incompletely- or
poorly- implemented features.  These technical debts greatly detract
from D's overall value, yet there is no easy way to fix them without
causing massive breakage of existing D code (or other D features).

It's sad, but it's reminiscient of the bad ole days when C++ shops would
dictate, via convention/policy to use only a certain, sane(r) subset of
C++ while avoiding the nastier parts.  The parts of the language to be
avoided is much smaller in D than in C++, but still, it's there, and
it detracts from the overall D experience.


T

-- 
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