4 ms·

What about D?

• mhd 16y ago
  That's a good question. D has been around for quite some time, has some well-known names (Bright, Alexandrescu), but has yet to break big. Compared to it, Go, a much more recent development, tends to do quite well (just my estimates, PL mindshare is a bit hard to measure). I think it's mostly because of some internal and positioning issues. I haven't been following it recently, but I remember some problems with different standard libraries, D 1 vs D 2, and three compilers that each had issues. Maybe that's resolved, but it certainly didn't make things look too good. Also, it seems to be more a successor to C++, which makes some people a bit distrustful. Yes, it's much cleaner, but also quite a bit more complex than C, and not a total programming environment as Java or C#. So it mainly gets its users from the C++ camp, which isn't the mightiest army nowadays (And whose Windows battalions aren't supported very well by D). Go is in the news a lot because of its Google and Unix (Pike, Thompson) heritage, because it's a bit simpler (more C crossed with Python than ++C++), and because it has some prominent concurrency support, which is close to the current hype (every emerging language has to prove its mettle there). By the way, don't read this as a value judgment. It's just a personal assessment why I think that Go is currently a bit more popular and will continue to be so.
  • jbarham 16y ago
    Although D has been around for longer, it's worth out that the Go amd64 (aka x64) compiler is the most mature compiler in the Go compiler suite (ARM, x86, amd64) but AFAIK the D compiler is only available for 32-bit x86.