Could D have fit Microsoft's needs?

[XavierAP]

On Tuesday, 23 July 2019 at 00:03:28 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>
> It's not very nice of you to say the results so far in language 
> outreach have not been good at all without being more specific.
>  The Foundation is just getting started and same thing with the 
> D blog.  Seems to me the latter has had a pretty strong start.
>
> The world is long people with strong views about what to 
> do,short on those willing to contribute something to make their 
> vision a reality.
>
> [...]
>
> Digital transformation is about adaptiveness and speed.  
> Moore's Law is dead in economic terms and yet useful data sets 
> might grow 10x in the next dozen years.  I don't think there 
> will be a shortage of people in coming years wanting to write 
> fast code fast and some of those will use D.  I've been saying 
> this for a few years now and since then Mercedes, Audi and Weka 
> are just a few of the notable adopters.  I don't think people 
> were expecting that to happen five years ago.  These things 
> take a long time.

I didn't mean to sound so negative. And I agree that there is 
some promising recent success in specific companies. My meaning 
is only that all avenues should be pursued, even if fixing one 
issue or implementing one memory management paradigm looks like 
the critical priority from the CS point of view. Precisely 
because, while improvements are on the way, D as is can be used 
by many more people than now.

For example there is a huge gap between the original vision for D 
(high and low level, GC in principle, etc) and the demands of the 
current community. The latter is a restriction of the former 
comparable to Unity Burst C# in relation to standard C#. It's 
good to address this demand but in addition, was the original 
vision so wrong; is D not a good high level language already (and 
more)?

Indeed the biggest success stories I know (such as Weka and other 
DConf talks) take advantage of D's abilities along the whole 
spectrum from high to very low level (dealing with whatever open 
issues, excess of internal dependencies, druntime etc); but why 
doesn't D have more adoption by purely high level users, 
competing with e.g. Python -- at least by those who are hitting 
its limitations and then need to interop with C/C++ etc?

Of course D's corporate sponsors aren't as powerful as Google, 
Microsoft, Oracle or Sun formerly, or even Mozilla. I used to 
assume that Python must have been the perfect example of a purely 
grassroots open-source success story; but upon closer examination 
Python did not have corporate sponsors -- it had two state 
sponsors (Dutch CWI and USA CNRI)! So indeed experience says that 
D is at a big disadvantage, and it is not so surprising (or 
discouraging) that it hasn't reached the adoption of even Rust or 
Go in a longer time; but this is a reason to try harder in every 
front. (Note: corporate sponsorship probably helps with 
promotion/PR/branding as much as it does with manpower and 
funding.)

I must admit I have a big mouth while I am not really using D for 
any sizable project. So as others I also see the issue from the 
point of view of what has stopped me from doing so (imo small 
ecosystem due to low adoption in a vicious circle). Still I've 
been following D for many years because I like it, I like and 
basically agree with Walter and Andrei's vision all along, and I 
hope it grows. I even post on LinkedIn some news e.g. the 
vacancies at Audi AID.

But precisely about media and promotion, I wonder if D has a 
strategy. There's these news groups/forums. Then there's third 
party media and various websites frequented by developers, which 
can be  separate islands (Reddit, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Twitter, 
Stack Overflow...) I reckon corporate directors visit some more 
than others or not at all. Though I do think introducing a new 
language will always come from senior developers below; but 
managers need to be (open to be) convinced.