Talk on D at DORS/CLUC

[aberba]

On Tuesday, 21 May 2024 at 16:33:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> 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 can see why C, C++,... folks might be the ones interested in 
compiler and language stuff.

> 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.

As I mentioned somewhere, IMO a cool language alone isn't 
convincing enough. Results are what sell. D has got everything 
needed to deliver every results and it already has to an intent 
judging by the testimonies of devs using it in the companies as 
seen from the D blog posts. I wished we'd sell more of those.

>
> 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

I think for those of us who don't necessarily care much about 
low-level language specifics (coming from GC languages), the 
hindrance will be the ecosystem of tools and libraries as we are 
"spoilt" by other language ecosystem. Although recently D has 
gotten far better.

VSCode seems to be the most dominant code editor and it's fairly 
good. For areas such as game dev, data science, and web dev, I've 
seen the numbers of well maintained libraries increase.

Most people who try D (including those I've recommended it to) 
agree the language looks good but that alone isn't enough, the 
question then become "what can I build with it?". So unless 
you're willing to build a lot from scratch, the options are 
limited outside the above mentioned (I could be wrong). At least 
that's my observation... I've only got experience in web dev and 
a little bit of Linux desktop GUI.

Things are progressing nicely with D, I'm very confident the 
adoption is only going up from here. I'm so happy about the 
recent leadership momentum.

Will be interesting to find out what folks in the community build 
with D. I miss those D annual surveys.