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D has been a bit of a "fail to launch" (not literally) for a long time now (2 decades?). What do you suspect has changed?
by dnautics 5y ago
D has been a bit of a "fail to launch" (not literally) for a long time now (2 decades?). What do you suspect has changed?
- vips7L 5y agoI don’t think much has changed except today’s developers are more open to natively compiled GC’d languages. Two decades ago everything was running in the JVM or CLR. But today we’re seeing investment in Go, nim, etc. I also think two decades ago you didn’t need your app to run everywhere. D can be your web app backend, it can compile to wasm, and it can be compiled to a shared library while still keeping you productive with a GC or without a GC if that’s your thing. This means you have a shared library that your electron desktop app can use or your iOS Swift app can use.
- dnautics 5y agoI think D tried to be too many thing for too many people. The "better C" paradigm is obviously desired (Nim, V, Zig, and others) but the D approach was to add more to C, (as is nim and V)... I guess zig is unique in that it started by removing things from C and adding one big thing and a few small things.
- vips7L 5y agoI love Zig! I started rewriting xv6 in it last year (I should probably get back to that). Just in my day to day I don't want to manage memory, but I still want performance. I'd write Go, but I'm just not a fan of its general approach to anything. I do agree D has a problem of a split community. You see it on the forums with 50% just wanting better C++ and 50% going GC. I'm actually looking forward to C# AOT sometime soon.
- pjmlp 5y agoTwo decades ago we also had natively compiled GC’d languages (VB 6 was the most mainstream one). Sun spoiled their uptake by pushing Java the way they did.