Why D is not a popular language?

[aberba]

On Friday, 8 January 2021 at 22:51:22 UTC, sighoya wrote:

> GTK 4 support?

Gtk4 just came out. Give it time. No Linux distribution or 
platform that I know of has support for gtk4 yet. So it's not 
going to be useful anytime soon. Give it time.

>
>> We have BeamU and DlangUI. They just don't have enough 
>> manpower to polish them up faster.
>
> Interesting, thanks. Cross-platform and pure D-Code in beamUI 
> seems promising...
> But I've never really heard about people talking about here, 
> why?

I have no idea. Maybe not enough people in the community do stuff 
related to that. May be. The community is not exactly managed BTW.

Starting 2021, I'm seeing even never (smaller) languages 
communities doing survey to factor those (or even few ideas) into 
language direction. We're doing none of those.

We've got a great language though.

>
>> If you're on Windows, Visual Studio with Visual-d should be 
>> enough. There's also the popular VS code.
>
> Yes, syntax checking and code completion is already quite good 
> (even in eclipse), however we have, afaict, no semantic 
> checking yet.
> We would either need to call DMD/LDC/GDC as compiler service 
> (don't know to which extent this is possible, or we need a new 
> compiler for the IDE).
> But heck, writing a new compiler incurs a lot of work and time 
> to get in sync with semantic D.

D has many new features. Including UFCS and our kind of 
metaprogramming that makes such smart IDE features not an easy 
thing to do for D.

It'll either take a while for DMD as a library (for tooling) to 
catch on OR a dedicated team of people to work on this full-tme.

As to when that'll happen, I'm not sure. Those in charge don't 
even use such fancy tools themselves. So it's it quite unlikely 
to come from them.