What are the prominent downsides of the D programming language?

[James Blachly]

On 9/29/20 11:35 AM, ddcovery wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> 
> I agree, I really appreciate your point and I understand it is difficult 
> to an experienced D developer to understand my point.
> 
> My "difficulty" (I assume it is my problem) is when reading 
> documentation about methods returning "auto"... it's hard, at the 
> beginning, to transform this mentally in something I can understand 
> (trying not to hide mentally the information)... D plasticity differs to 
> other simplest "generics" type systems (like Scala) and you need double 
> effort to understand it.
> 
> An added difficulty  (that I don't know if the "swift developers" will 
> suffer with xcode) is the missing of a good "autocomplete" or "type 
> inference" that helps developers to understand the type that an "auto" 
> function is really returning in the context of an evocation (i.e.: Right 
> now, I am working with flutter/dart and vscode shows me the inferred 
> type of a variable when hovering with the mouse).
> 

I am not NEW NEW, but new enough that I remember precisely the feeling 
you are describing; you are right on with respect to one of the hardest 
mental barriers in the D learning curve.

This [`auto` being used to simplify complex return types; and the notion 
of potentially very complex template-generated return types in general, 
especially as a componetn of the stdlib] is something that I think would 
improve visibility and adoption if it were explicitly addressed in 
tutorials, documentation, books, etc.