Having "blessed" 3rd party libraries may make D more popular and stable for building real software.

[WraithGlade]

On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 19:30:35 UTC, monkyyy wrote:
> On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 18:06:28 UTC, WraithGlade wrote:
>> I am unfortunately however still very much a D newbie though 
>> and thus I am very reluctant to depart from the mainline D 
>> ecosystem considering that even less library support and 
>> information will be available for Open D in all likelihood. I 
>> want to make real projects for redistribution to end-users.
>
> adr is the largest lib writter; you could debate who's the most 
> important one of those but by line count and attempted scope, 
> adr does all the things and dub and upstream are dead to him 
> unless you start paying; or something like that.
>
> There is still a large degree of compatibility(tho upstream may 
> one day make a stupid breaking change) upstream isnt really... 
> moving, these wild goose chases are just irreverent to code I 
> write and mostly irrelivent to most historical libs; you cant 
> slap @safe on old code without basically redesigning it or if 
> you did and theres a break @safe change, afr is most likely 
> willing to revert.
>
> You asked for shipping raylib; look: 
> https://github.com/opendlang/d/tree/cleaning-up/source/odc/raylib
>
> its not shipping quite yet but if you were to do some cleaning 
> and ask adr it probably be a week away; while I smashed my head 
> into upstreams disinterest for years

That is *extremely alarming*. Thank you for this very helpful and 
illuminating information!

I spent some of this morning reading and investigating deeper 
into this, such as reading the original Open D announcement page 
more carefully this time compared to the first time it was 
alluded to and reading a few other related sources and forum 
posts too.

I also found a link to [the contribution bar graph for the D 
language over 
time](https://github.com/dlang/phobos/graphs/contributors) and 
indeed **the contribution rate to mainline D has plummeted to a 
small fraction of once it once was, starting around ~2018 with a 
precipitous drop and continuing to decline on average 
thereafter** and now reduced to a small fraction of what it once 
was.

In contrast, I was previously thinking that Open D was a nascent 
fork whose influence would probably be mere diversification for 
the next few years and that mainline D was likely still 
reasonably healthy and probably even more so than some new 
competing languages, but after looking into it more today the D 
language seems far more imminently endangered than I thought.

Its current status as having 3 compilers and *seemingly* fair 
viability for real work for the current set of libraries may be 
mostly the result of preexisting momentum and signs of rapid and 
existentially risky decay in light of this new contextual 
information are quite clear now.

This information brings to light such a huge increase in the risk 
factor of using D that I am now strongly reconsidering using the 
language *at all*, especially given I want to ship *real 
software* above all else. I cannot even expect that the most 
important community libraries will have any new updates a few 
years from now given the rapid rates of likely decay now apparent.

I may just accept working with a less performant and less 
expressive language, even though I've invested a few months in 
learning D (reading both books entirely and experimenting) and 
was enjoying myself.


On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 20:58:33 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:
> [...]
>
> This is once again D flexing its muscles as the all-time king 
> of NIH. Just follow what other languages do. Install a package 
> and then add it to your program the same as you do with Phobos:
>
> ```
> import std.math;
> import user.raylib;
> ```
>
> But I've wasted enough time pushing for this over the years. 
> Other languages do it and D does it with Phobos, yet the main 
> objection is that there's no way to do it.
>
> [...]

Yeah, the self-contradictory rhetoric of the notion that it can't 
or shouldn't be done was striking me as quite odd. The fact that 
several others (at a minimum) have had problems getting these 
points across and have given up is (I am increasingly suspecting) 
making me think I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely with D.

That's a shame, since I really would like a saner C++, but if 
substantive progress and the survival of the language in terms of 
relevance at large is really as hopeless as it seems then it 
seems likely wise that I should leave D entirely before I 
over-invest in an (apparently/probably) systematically rapidly 
rotting ecosystem.

Maybe I'll check back on the language again a long while from now 
though. Alas, such a shame... there is/was so much lost 
opportunity for this language.


On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 21:00:02 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:
> [...]
>
> It's not a bad idea to have a list of libraries for different 
> categories to help beginners. C++ has boost for example, which 
> I have always seen as the first extension of the standard 
> libraries that folks use and trust (and then often get 
> incorporated into the standard library later on). I think the 
> new phobos 3 as I understand is quite open to adding more 
> modules anyway.
>
> At the least, having a list of popular dub packages would be 
> useful as a test-suite for new builds of the compiler. Maybe 
> that's the place to start by building a testsuite with a few 
> popular dub libraries. If there isn't a wiki page already on 
> this, that would be another value-add to the community I'm sure.

Yeah, that does seem like a reasonable strategy to at least make 
some substantive progress.


On Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 09:13:40 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
> @WraithGlade
>
> "blessing" will not help it. - Quality will. If package is of 
> good quality - it will automatically become "blessed".

The meaning of "blessing" a library in this context is literally 
*making an official and regular effort to improve the quality of 
important libraries and make them more seamless and usable for 
real software, i.e. to increase the quality in all the senses 
that library quality matters to users*. Thus, translating your 
statement back into the actual meaning of the word "blessed" in 
the context of this thread results in the following real meaning:

> [Making an official commitment to strongly improving the 
> quality of the most important libraries] will not help [those 
> libraries]. - Quality will. If [a] package is of good quality - 
> it will automatically become [subject to an official commitment 
> by the language development team to ensure the library(s) 
> continue(s) to be of high quality].

Do you see how this is actually just a nonsensical tautology that 
results in a blatant self-contradiction?

Frankly, this seems like exactly the kind of out-of-touch 
circular rhetoric that has historically plagued these forums and 
some parts of the D community (based on looking at prior threads 
here and people's commentary in communities outside of D) and 
seems likely to create the kind of muddled atmosphere that 
prevents constructive change from happening.

I have noticed this unpleasant pattern before on programming 
communities though, always with very harmful effects: confusing 
the emotion of certainty with actual logical certainty born from 
genuine logical reasoning.

Many programmers become so used to thinking of themselves as 
being right because they know more than average non-programmers 
and so adopt the posture of being in the right by default, but 
context is everything and in reality nobody ever has an a priori 
"rightness" that can ever be used as a real substitute for 
genuinely thinking about a different idea when one encounters 
such an idea.

Dejan Lekic's comment seems like a microcosm of why so many 
people have become frustrated with D and have simply given up on 
it since this kind of duplicitous rhetoric seems pervasive and 
not amenable to change given that years of such attempts have 
apparently failed. I previously just assumed that was because of 
programmers being our usual salty and opinionated selves, but the 
new evidence I've seen today suggests those criticisms hold 
water. Why else would the contributions have decayed so rapidly 
to almost nothing compared to much greater prior rates even just 
a few years ago?

Also, putting the contribution graph aside, on the forums I have 
noticed that older threads from just a few years ago likewise had 
a much greater diversity of commentators but that too shows signs 
of decline in recent years based on my impression.

It's safe to invest in a stable though only moderately large 
language community, but not a rapidly decaying one.

If this is how it is then it seems I'd be insane to use D in a 
real shipped project, even though I really wanted to.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory... That's a 
recipe for a language to have user adoption that essentially 
behaves like a sieve: quickly losing users at the same rate or 
faster than it gains them, leaking momentum and losing 
opportunity constantly.

That being said, to end on a positive note: There's no denying 
that many aspects of the D language are designed very well and it 
has a really pleasant feeling as a C++ alternative.

I really hope for a better future in that regard, but I'm not 
lighting myself on fire for it.

See you guys and gals around and best of luck in all your 
programming endeavors!

Have a wonderful day/night/week.

If stressed out by these considerations, I suggest going on a 
nice walk in nature. That always really helps me and nothing is a 
better way to help ease one's thoughts and resettle or 
recalibrate one's perspective.