4 ms·

I'm getting the impression that D is a failure. Is there any bigger project written in it? If not, why would it fail?

• qznc 10y ago
  Companies using it: https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html https://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html Weka explicitly says "over 200K LoC"
• Manishearth 10y ago
  People use D, and it is a pretty decent language. I'm not an avid D user, but I have a guess as to why it is not so widely used. To me, D is somewhat of a "I like C++s features and ergonomics and want a similar languages with all the features built in from the ground up" (+awesome metaprogramming). One of C++s drawbacks is that features have been bolted on in hacky ways due to backwards compatibility issues. D is like C++, but without this. It is a good goal, and from my limited experience with D I think they have achieved it well. Thing is, such a language will largely be adopted by people who use C++. And the problem with these folks is that they already know C++. Once you are used to it it doesn't feel so bad. Despite its drawbacks, C++ has lots of tooling, a large ecosystem, and familiarity. Rust is less affected by this for two reasons. One is that it gets a lot of production users from non-C++ shops who want to use a systems language to speed up their Python/etc tight loops. They would rather not worry about segfaults and stuff. The other is that for C++ users, Rust scratches a large itch. The learning curve for Rust is a lot worse than D, but for many the benefits might overcome this. You can't get used to segfaults the way you get used to template metaprogramming. I would give D time. These issues just slow adoption, not stop it. That is fine.