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

[jmh530]

On Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 18:05:46 UTC, WraithGlade wrote:
> [snip]
> 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.
> [snip]

I don't have time to read your whole post, but this jumped out at 
me. This is a graph of contributors to phobos, the D standard 
library. It's not a graph of contributors to the whole D language.

Phobos had a lot of activity when the functionality was getting 
built out and when Andrei was more directly involved. The number 
of contributors fell off because functionality was largely in 
place and there was uncertainty about what the next steps would 
be (phobos 3.0, what was the safety/container story).

So I wouldn't necessarily conclude that fewer contributors to 
phobos is necessarily reflective of the whole language. If you 
look at the same graph for dmd, you would see contributors more 
or less flat from 2013 to 2022 and then a modest decline since 
2022. That's kind of consistent with what I've observed.

And of course, contributors to dmd aren't the same as people 
using the D language, but it doesn't have the same issues 
associated with using phobos contributors as a metric.