Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[welkam]

On Saturday, 19 October 2019 at 11:21:10 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Saturday, 19 October 2019 at 10:37:12 UTC, drug wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm sincerely wondered why you can't stop posting here if you 
>> gave up using D long time ago? What is the reason that forces 
>> you to continue this non-technical correspondence?
>
> I'm sincerely wondering why the D community avoids doing the 
> obvious and keeps wondering why adoption rates are still low, 
> after 20 years. As I remember it was all about 1. ranges, 2. 
> templates, 3. functional programming and 4. memory safety, 
> nice, but basics were / and are still being neglected. I 
> understand that many users might not care because e.g. they 
> don't use IDEs or don't develop for mobile, but when people 
> keep raising these issues and other new languages immediately 
> work on ARM and IDE plugins, still nobody here sees the big 
> pink elephant in the room. And it's not "scarce" resources, 
> it's that nobody seems to care. If you think about the amount 
> of time people spend discussing a syntactic detail in template 
> declarations and stuff like that, and then people tell me there 
> aren't enough resources, c'mon. The truth is that the community 
> enjoys bikeshedding but ignores the basics. Maybe my 
> conversation is non-technical in the sense that I don't 
> bikeshed about template syntax, but stability, 
> automagicaltooling and support for mobile are still technical 
> issues. If you don't sort those out, D will remain a niche 
> language. It's a nobrainer, really, I don't understand this 
> obstinate resistance to the obvious.

> If you think about the amount of time people spend discussing a 
> syntactic detail in template declarations and stuff like that, 
> and then people tell me there aren't enough resources, c'mon.
Talking != working. If people stopped talking that doesnt mean 
they would start working. Thats a huge mistake to make for some 
one who thinks he is the only reasonable person here.

> when people keep raising these issues and other new languages 
> immediately work on ARM and IDE plugins, still nobody here sees 
> the big pink elephant in the room

Zig - doesnt have proper ARM support
Nim - it got it for free because it translates to C
Crystal - didnt had windows support not to mention arm
Rust - It kind of compiles but no tests are run so its not 
guaranteed to work. RustC and cargo are not supported on ARM.
Go - doesnt work on Android but has linux Arm support.
jai - ???

Before claiming of how other languages immediately work on on ARM 
do some fact checking. Yes Android is big but the only new 
language that has good support for it is Kotlin.

Here are some facts:
1. One of the first D language foundation expenditures were 
paying for Visual studio plugin enhancement. If you didnt know 
Visualstudio is an IDE and it was concluded that enhancing user 
experience was a key thing in making D grow. This directly 
contradicts your view.
2. Every year D foundation gets more money to invest in D. This 
and Ethans money kick started ARM effort. Money is still being 
raised for iOS port by the way. If as you say thing were not done 
because we didnt understood that things were important then tell 
me why we are still raising money? Why money was required to 
kickstart it in the first place?

While mobile development is huge its not the best strategic 
decision to invest huge amounts of resources pursuing that 
market. Let me explain. Firstly it is easier to sell water to a 
thirsty man. There is no indication that mobile people are 
thirsty for a new programming language. Second thing is that you 
would have to compete with Google and Apple at the same time. 
Competing against one is suicide let alone against both. If we 
did as you want D would fail because it would never reach the 
polish that Google or Apple can afford and with nothing to offer 
in other areas D would just die.

But there are other areas where people are thirsty for new 
programming language. They are:
1. Research
2. Game dev
3. Desktop application creation.

Researchers and scientist each day are facing with ever 
increasing data sets and python or R are chocking on those huge 
data sets. The other option researchers have is either C or C++ 
and they dont like programming in them. D as better C allows for 
easy library development which could be easily be used in Python 
or other languages that researches use. DasBetterC allowed 
development for mir glass library that is a cornerstone library 
for any subsequent development in research area. Little 
investment in this are is paying of big time with companies 
sponsoring development for new libraries and tools in D. With 
data frames support coming D is growing stronger in this are. 
Since "critics" never mention this area as growth opportunity 
show how much they really understand.

For game developers its very important to have C++ 
interoperability because there are lots of code already written 
in C++ and you cant just rewrite it. And what do you know there 
is effort in improving interoperability with C++.

On discord there is working group for GUI library.

It seems that people working on D perform const benefit analysis 
before investing and from what I can tell they are way better at 
deciding on what to work or where to best invest money than you.