D needs to learn from competing languages and ecosystems.

[jmh530]

On Tuesday, 15 September 2026 at 21:50:46 UTC, Lance Bachmeier 
wrote:
> [snip]
>
> The important change since 2013 is the availability of AI. I 
> can rewrite entire C libraries in D for a few dollars (or even 
> for free, using an existing subscription or running local 
> models, depending on the situation). $100 will go a long way in 
> 2026, and the amount of volunteer time, while still 
> substantial, is greatly reduced.
>
> The way forward is for people to not only give the type of 
> feedback you've provided, but more importantly, to provide 
> enough details for people to actually make progress. I think 
> purely vibe coded libraries and apps are a dumb idea. Creating 
> tooling with the assistance of AI and not even reading the code 
> carefully is a different story. We should view this as an 
> opportunity to close the gap with other languages now that 
> resources have stopped being a moat.

People using tools like this is a great opportunity for D. I 
recently started using Codex with GPT-6 Astra, and it is quite 
good.

Of course, people are using these tools to improve functionality 
of other languages too.

Where you talk about people not even reading the code carefully, 
I think we will see a lot more of this TBH. One of the advantages 
of D is that it was a really powerful language and also elegant. 
Elegant might be less important if fewer people are reading it. 
What might matter more is how efficiently the AI can write and 
iterate on the code (having DMD compile fast is a positive here) 
and the performance when it is run. AI is likely already at the 
point where it will be writing code with fewer bugs than good 
programmers.