11 ms·

Back when Andrei Alexandrescu was working at Facebook, I had hoped that Facebook would adopt D as a standard language. That didn't happen, and it seems unlikel

by curtis 8y ago

Back when Andrei Alexandrescu was working at Facebook, I had hoped that Facebook would adopt D as a standard language. That didn't happen, and it seems unlikely that D will get a powerful corporate sponsor. I think that would have greatly helped D not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of popularity. In an ideal world, good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the world we actually live in.

bachmeier 8y ago
> good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits Well I suppose that depends on what you mean by "merits". D has struggled with things like IDE support and breaking changes. A lot of that is now cleared up or being worked on as the language has seen increased activity over the last few years. I expect remaining issues to get cleaned up in the near future. Another thing that kept folks away was the garbage collector. Quite a lot of work is being done to make it possible to use as much of the language as possible without the GC. Nonetheless, for many potential users, fear of the GC was a reason to not use D.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  You can use DasBetterC now with no GC whatsoever.
  - grok2 8y ago
    What is DasBetterC?
    - girvo 8y ago
      Subset of the D language that acts as a “better C”. No GC, manual allocation etc. and no runtime I believe.
    - NonEUCitizen 8y ago
      D as a Better C from Walter's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192702
      - grok2 8y ago
        So, not the German "Das"...I was aware of -betterC, but was curious about Walter referring to it everywhere of late as DasBetterC.
        WalterBright 8y ago
        I was in Muenchen when I noticed the "Das", so yes, it works as the German Das.
nine_k 8y ago
Corporate support or not, Rust seems to be a better contender for the crown of the sane successor to C++. D might have been an important evolutionary step, possibly showing what does not work well for the niche it was trying to fill.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Rust has Mozilla. Support from a big corp is one way to get things like IDE support ironed out, as they can throw extra resources at it.
  - fnord123 8y ago
    The IDE support has come from various places including Jetbrains.
    - bluejekyll 8y ago
      Jetbrains has sponsored an alternative to the RLS, Rust Language Server. The RLS is used in VSCode, I think Atom, I’ve seen a port for Emacs, and I think Sublime. The community effort is behind the RLS, the Jetbrains plugin for IntelliJ doesn’t use any of the Rust compiler, as far as I’m aware, but it does have a lot of fans, so they’re doing something right. As a Java fan of IntelliJ, I still prefer the RLS+VSCode, but it’s great seeing all the IDEs being developed for Rust!
    - earenndil 8y ago
      IDE support came from the community as an intellij addon, which jetbrains then officially sponsored. But they didn't decide to throw their own resources at making such a thing from scratch.
    - leshow 8y ago
      Lots of people use RLS, and AFAIK that's created by folks working at mozilla, though no doubt now it's mostly a community effort.
- curtis 8y ago
ekr 8y ago
At least Facebook is currently heavily investing in Haskell (using it for some core infrastructure, and having hired some core GHC contributors). MSFT is also contributing to Haskell by supporting Haskell-related research, and employing Simon Peyton Jones. Jane Street Capital is also heavily investing in OCaml. While these languages are occupying a different niche than D, they are more arguably innovative/ integrate way more research / plt theory.
- xtreak29 8y ago
  Netflix opensourced a neural network library that runs some critical piece of code but they are mostly a polyglot shop. https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow
baruch 8y ago
We are not yet up to Facebook power at weka.io but we fully use D and support some development of it. We have also released recently a library we use internally for user space threads and other support stuff, called mecca. D is really nice and very effective, even for a soft real-time system like ours. Most of our code didn't do any GC but where we don't care too much we can make our life a little easier.

by curtis 8y ago

bachmeier 8y ago

> good programming languages would win or lose on their own merits Well I suppose that depends on what you mean by "merits". D has struggled with things like IDE support and breaking changes. A lot of that is now cleared up or being worked on as the language has seen increased activity over the last few years. I expect remaining issues to get cleaned up in the near future. Another thing that kept folks away was the garbage collector. Quite a lot of work is being done to make it possible to use as much of the language as possible without the GC. Nonetheless, for many potential users, fear of the GC was a reason to not use D.

WalterBright 8y ago
You can use DasBetterC now with no GC whatsoever.
- grok2 8y ago
  What is DasBetterC?
  - girvo 8y ago
    Subset of the D language that acts as a “better C”. No GC, manual allocation etc. and no runtime I believe.
  - NonEUCitizen 8y ago
    D as a Better C from Walter's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17192702
    - grok2 8y ago
      So, not the German "Das"...I was aware of -betterC, but was curious about Walter referring to it everywhere of late as DasBetterC.
      - WalterBright 8y ago
        I was in Muenchen when I noticed the "Das", so yes, it works as the German Das.

nine_k 8y ago

Corporate support or not, Rust seems to be a better contender for the crown of the sane successor to C++. D might have been an important evolutionary step, possibly showing what does not work well for the niche it was trying to fill.

iainmerrick 8y ago
Rust has Mozilla. Support from a big corp is one way to get things like IDE support ironed out, as they can throw extra resources at it.
- fnord123 8y ago
  The IDE support has come from various places including Jetbrains.
  - bluejekyll 8y ago
    Jetbrains has sponsored an alternative to the RLS, Rust Language Server. The RLS is used in VSCode, I think Atom, I’ve seen a port for Emacs, and I think Sublime. The community effort is behind the RLS, the Jetbrains plugin for IntelliJ doesn’t use any of the Rust compiler, as far as I’m aware, but it does have a lot of fans, so they’re doing something right. As a Java fan of IntelliJ, I still prefer the RLS+VSCode, but it’s great seeing all the IDEs being developed for Rust!
  - earenndil 8y ago
    IDE support came from the community as an intellij addon, which jetbrains then officially sponsored. But they didn't decide to throw their own resources at making such a thing from scratch.
  - leshow 8y ago
    Lots of people use RLS, and AFAIK that's created by folks working at mozilla, though no doubt now it's mostly a community effort.
curtis 8y ago

ekr 8y ago

At least Facebook is currently heavily investing in Haskell (using it for some core infrastructure, and having hired some core GHC contributors). MSFT is also contributing to Haskell by supporting Haskell-related research, and employing Simon Peyton Jones. Jane Street Capital is also heavily investing in OCaml. While these languages are occupying a different niche than D, they are more arguably innovative/ integrate way more research / plt theory.

xtreak29 8y ago
Netflix opensourced a neural network library that runs some critical piece of code but they are mostly a polyglot shop. https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow

baruch 8y ago

We are not yet up to Facebook power at weka.io but we fully use D and support some development of it. We have also released recently a library we use internally for user space threads and other support stuff, called mecca. D is really nice and very effective, even for a soft real-time system like ours. Most of our code didn't do any GC but where we don't care too much we can make our life a little easier.