Could D have fit Microsoft's needs?

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 7/18/19 8:12 PM, Mike Franklin 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.
> 
> ... and D could complete better with Rust if it had @safe-by-default and 
> statically-check ownership/borrowing mechanism as Walter recently proposed.
> 
> I think there is something that Microsoft is overlooking with D. In the 
> last 2 paragraphs of the blog post they say that programmers should be 
> using managed languages like C#|F# whenever possible, but use Rust when 
> the prior don't scale.
> 
> D is unique from Rust and C# in that is scales both up and down.

For almost as long as I can remember now, it's always bugged me to no 
end that the vast majority of the programming world is completely, 100% 
convinced that a a good general-purpose high-AND-low language isn't even 
possible (or desirable).

It's always been obvious to me that it IS possible, and also that the 
popular false dichotomy only came about because more than a decade of 
language design took all low-level and threw it straight out the window 
(and they all did it because that was Java's approach, and Java was 
super hot Macarena-popular shit at the time). That left low-level to C, 
C++...umm...assembler...and really not much else. (And then, of course, 
JVM eventually would up proving that the whole VM-sandboxing thing 
doesn't really even save you from the security problems it was created 
to solve anyway.) I never understood why nobody else could see that's 
what was happening.

Maybe that's what D's slogan should be about, "high-level AND low-level" 
(instead of the "fast, fast, fast" horribleness).