We are forking D

[bomat]

On Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 17:53:27 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> It all depends on how you define "successful". If you define 
> success as having a huge user community, then your paragraph 
> above applies. I would argue that there are alternative ways to 
> measure success. Is Scheme a success? OpenBSD? JS Bach? I say 
> emphatically "yes" (especially regarding Bach) and yet all of 
> them have user communities orders of magnitude smaller than 
> their most popular competitors.

In this context, my definition of "successful" is a language that 
you can put your trust in.
Like in this thread, just as an example:
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/qwrguthjwvawnjtpzcbf@forum.dlang.org
This is about the question if using D for a major commercial 
project is a solid business decision.
I am not so sure, to be honest.
And please be assured that I'm not trying to trash-talk here, I 
just call it as I see it, as a newcomer to the language.

D has some awesome aspects to it, that's why I started looking 
into it for personal projects. I appreciate that there are some 
good books, I got the ones by Ali Cehreli, Mike Parker, and Adam 
Ruppe, plus the one by Kai Nacke on vibe.d. So there's good 
learning material.

But on the other hand, a lot of people seem to have walked away 
from the language over the years, like Andrei Alexandrescu. Fine, 
people walk away from projects all the time, doesn't have to mean 
anything. But then, looking at the forums, there seems to be a 
lot of  dissent and even a recent fork.

When I tried to get help with my vibe.d project, I didn't get 
much feedback in this forum and the "official" vibe.d forum at 
https://forum.rejectedsoftware.com/ seems abandoned entirely. 
What's that all about? What happened to Sönke Ludwig, did he walk 
away, too? What does that mean for the future of vibe.d?
Has any large project ever been built with vibe.d? Apparently 
not: 
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/mjewutfvitpnlovbwofu@forum.dlang.org

I'm using VS Code as my IDE, mostly because I can use it under 
Windows and Linux alike. I quite like its good D support provided 
by the code-d plugin.
Problem is, though, that it hasn't been updated for two years: 
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=webfreak.code-d
I asked about that here 
(https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gwulbuatekebrtrdmyhi@forum.dlang.org) and got no answer. What's up with WebFreak001, is he gone, too? I just don't know.

I will continue with my D/vibe.d project because it is just a fun 
experiment that I do in my free time. If I get stuck at some 
point, fine, it still will have been a great learning experience.
But would I stick with D if my business depended on it? Hell no. 
I'd probably use Go or maybe even C++ with wt or something like 
that. Something that I can be reasonably sure will still be 
maintained in 5 years from now.

Maybe I will be able to complete my project successfully. But as 
to the D language as a whole, it does not feel like a success 
story to me.

Please feel free to correct me on any and all points that I got 
wrong (I'm sure there are many) - again, I have been describing 
my totally subjective impressions, with no intention to offend 
anyone.