Talk on D at DORS/CLUC

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, May 21, 2024 3:14:57 AM MDT aberba via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 20 May 2024 at 15:43:46 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:
> > On Monday, 20 May 2024 at 08:03:12 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
> >
> > D has a GC that is the source of many complaints, ...
> > community, but I thought they were fans of RC, based on the
> > repeated claims that you should seldom need to do manual memory
> > management in C++.
>
> The chase after C++ devs for the past 20yrs hasn't yielded that
> much adoption by them so I'm not sure it's worth pressing
> primarily in that direction. Those who like D like myself do that
> for what it is. I'm sure there are many Java, C#, Js, C and
> Python devs than there are of hardline C++ devs

A lot of the major contributors to D over the years have come from a C++
background, but we've historically attracted folks from all over the place.
I don't know how valuable it is to try to attract a specific set of folks,
though I'm terrible at evangalizing or marketing the language anyway. Plenty
of folks I've dealt with over the years (including plenty of cowokers) know
full-well that I like D, but I'm not sure that _any_ of them have decided to
actually try it.

I get the impression that a lot of the folks who end up using D long term
are folks who were sufficiently unhappy with some aspect of what they were
using before that they were willing to put up with D's shortcomings (be they
perceived or actual), and they ultimately liked the benefits enough to stick
around. But anyone looking for a pure win or who was already pretty happy
with what they have generally doesn't stick around, if they give it a chance
at all. And I don't know if there's much that we can do to fix that. For
better or worse, in general, I just try to make D the best that I can and
don't worry all that much about trying to convince anyone to use it, though
we obviously need better marketing in general, since that's never been
something that we've been good at.

- Jonathan M Davis