Top 3 use cases for D

[Chris Piker]

On Sunday, 20 October 2024 at 22:05:45 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:
javascript can be really slow for some operations.
>
> To some degree I thought GTK had become a default GUI library 
> for many folks.
>
> There's several tutorials here otherwise: 
> https://gtkdcoding.com/

Oh, never been to that page, didn't know it existed. Thanks for 
the tip!

Though, when I go there I don't see any instructions on how to 
"install" gtkd.

> Perhaps something for Phobos3 to consider otherwise -- it's a 
> big project, but maybe a few simple widgets to start could do 
> the trick.

I think it's just a packaging / promotion issue.  Right now if I 
install dmd on Windows I get a compiler and a package manager. 
Nice enough, and a great start. But a new user is left to google 
stack overflow to find out how to make a simple GUI.  I just 
flipped through all the pages in the DLang tour and none of the 
them mention how you might get a window on the screen to display 
your output.  There are nice sections on vibe.d and mir, but 
nothing for graphical output.  That seems a bit odd on the 
surface.

A couple years ago I had to make a simple test control program 
for a lab apparatus we designed.  There were many environments to 
chose from.  I ended up selecting python because TK + matplotlib 
provided all the GUI portions that we needed to keep a technician 
from getting confused.  Python provided beautiful plots, but 
ended up being somewhat of a pain because it's not easy to 
multi-thread and couldn't keep up with sensor output over a USB-C 
port, so C handled data collection.  Would have been nicer to do 
everything in D, though I don't know what data plotting libs are 
recommended.

Anyway, D's a small community so selecting one windowing wrapper 
(SDL maybe?) and promoting it for simple jobs could be useful. 
Right now there are multiple projects but none has the guarantee 
of longevity that dmd and dub have.  I presume something that's 
also useful for the embedded development crowd would be a good 
choice.