6 ms·

Why D sees low adoption?

by Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago

WalterBright 11mo ago
We could do a better job at marketing
- PedroBatista 11mo ago
  Build the “killer app” that the audience wants and needs and where D is the best lang to do it and justify the investment in learning yet another lang. I have no idea of what that is and nobody knows, it’s the universal problem of any product/lang/tech. Right place at the right time I guess
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    A killer app can be built in any language.
    - PedroBatista 11mo ago
      Of course it can, but different killer apps for a different crowd. A missile tracking system wouldn't be the kind of application to do in PHP. Wrong app, wrong crowd. I'm aware of D since it's inception more or less but don't know it very well. I would say D lacks a "bombastic" feature and maybe that's both the reason is not used more but also why is such a good language. It's not "memory safe" like Rust, yes it's fast but so is C/C++, it doesn't have the "massive parallelism/ always-on" robustness like Erlang. It has a bit of everything which is good and bad. Being a mid all-arounder is OK in my book, perhaps it's more a matter of some "post-AI" tech startup adopt it and get massive or famous, like Ruby because of the Web 2.0 era or Erlang with the Whatsapp thing. Maybe D is good the way it is and will always be there.
      - WalterBright 11mo ago
        D doesn't have a bombastic or killer feature. What it has is elegance. It simplifies things, and smooths out the ugly stuff. You don't have to worry if your char is signed or unsigned, or how many bits are in an int, or whether to use dot or arrow, or remember to make your destructor virtual, and on and on. It's a more memory safe language than C/C++, no need to worry about forward references, strong encapsulation, simple modules, and so on. And let's face it - the C preprocessor is an abomination in modern languages, why does it persist?
      - dolmen 11mo ago
        A missile tracking system is definitely a killer app.
- brabel 11mo ago
  I really like D and want to use D instead of Zig if I can... But it's difficult to do so! Nothing to do with marketing in my case, at least. The reasons are : * `dub` is badly documented and does dumb things like including test code in the generated binary. * `serve-d` is terrible. It can't handle even my little hello world programs - either crashes or consumes 100% CPU until I manually kill it. * MacOS support sucks. All the time I have problems: the linker didn't work for years (fixed now). Immediate segmentation faults currently (fixed in nightly AFAIK). C code using the new flat128 doesn't compile (I think it was fixed already?). Just constant frustration. * Too many features, many broken. It has an experimental borrow-checking feature, I tried to use it but it's largely undocumented. People in the Forum told me to that feature is completely unfinished. It has an allocators package as well, but no idea how I can make use of those like I would in Zig. Would love to see a well written post about that. Using D in betterC mode is what I am most interested about exactly because it looks more like Zig and C than Java - and performs much better. But currently, that means forgetting about Phobos, the standard library, as that's written exclusively with GC and Exceptions in mind. Maybe that's ok as you can just use all C libraries you want, but would be nice to have some D conveniences to make that worthwhile. Apart from that, I completely agree that D's comptime and metaprogramming is the best I've seen in any language (except for Lisp of course). All I need to keep using D is much better tooling and clarification about what parts of the language are "half-baked" (especially around DIP1000) and which parts are stable - perhaps "editions" will give us that, will check it out when it's ready. Oh and also top-notch MacOS support... I know that's a moving target but even Zig manages to handle that just fine, why not D?!
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    The borrow checker is there as experimental, it is not an official part of the language. It is unfinished due to lack of interest in it by the D community. I don't understand the special purpose behind Zig's allocators. It's just an interface. I make custom allocators in D all the time, it's trivial. Dip1000 is also an experimental feature and is not part of the core language. On a more pragmatic note, D has a notion of "sinks", aka output ranges. They provide a simple interface that accepts input, which is appended to the output range. Since the user of the sink has no idea what the sink is doing, just that it accepts input. This is a fun and very practical way to move the choice of how to allocate memory to the caller rather than the callee. gdc and ldc offer top notch D support for the Mac.
- bnolsen 11mo ago
  I don't think D brought enough new to the table. I had already been coding in c++ for a while and was getting tired of all the little things wrong with c++. While D cleaned up a few things it was already too complex for my taste. And the whole GC thing followed by the D2 fiasco and I lost interest. When dipping my toes into Rust I also got the same vibe from it that I had from D. Too much complexity built in. I guess that made me a sucker for Zig because it is able to combine simplicity, cleverness, clarity and high performance.
throwawaymaths 11mo ago
too many features. tryhard vibe
- WalterBright 11mo ago
  We're implementing "editions" in order to remove some features that don't deliver enough value.
  - agumonkey 11mo ago
    how is the community going these days ? stable ? growing ?
Kapendev 11mo ago
Good question, but I don't think this is the place for that conversation :) And I say that as a Dlang fan :)
- johnfn 11mo ago
  Why would a comment suggesting to use D not be the place to have a conversation for why D doesn't see adoption?
  - Kapendev 11mo ago
    You and Walter could do that, but this post is about some cool devs and their cool Zig project.
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      The title is "Why we built Lightpanda in Zig", i.e. language selection criteria. Comparing it with D is on topic.
- bachmeier 11mo ago
  Absolutely. Rust is the only language that's allowed to derail HN programming threads.
spiffytech 11mo ago
In part, the compiler wasn't fully FOSS until 2017.
- WalterBright 11mo ago
  The gdc and ldc compilers were fully FOSS around 2007. We were able to get dmd's backend license fixed in 2017.
  - spiffytech 11mo ago
    Ah, I stand corrected!
soulbadguy 11mo ago
I think in many ways D was just too ahead of it's time; Packaging the same feature set and abstraction level of C++ in much cleaner and saner package wasn't really seen at valuable at that time. I think that if D were to be "re-release today" with a lighter syntax, and some coporate backing a-la GO/swift/typescript/carbon; It would find quite a bit of success.
- auxym 11mo ago
  Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release? No judgement against trying to monetize valuable work, but in this day and nearly everyone expects free and OSS compilers/interpreters and core tooling.
  - bachmeier 11mo ago
    > Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release? The backend for the DMD compiler was not fully open source for a number of years. That's because Symantec owned some of the code and they were not willing to let it be relicensed. They did allow that in 2017. It was never a paid product AFAIK. Overall, that was beneficial to the D community. The GDC backend has always been open, and for some time has been part of GCC. The LDC backend was developed to use LLVM. It's possible that there would not have been motivation for those projects if DMD's backend had been open from the start. DMD compiles fast but the performance is not competitive with the other compilers if you're working on something that needs to push the CPU to its limits.
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      I'm only able to work on the DMD backend now and then, and so it has fallen behind compilers with a small army working solely on a backend. Sadly, the number of people nerdly enough to want to work on a code generator is very, very small. Me, I find it quite enjoyable. I cannot even think of anyone who wrote a full stack compiler these days.
lenkite 11mo ago
> Why D sees low adoption? Most components of the D standard library (Phobos) use garbage collection by default (when I last checked). This unfortunately removes it as a contender in the same space as Zig and Rust. And once you move to the GC space, there are a truckload of GC languages - it is the non-GC ones that are rare. IMHO stdlib GC was one of the major barriers stopping D in the system programming space.

Why D sees low adoption?

WalterBright 11mo ago

We could do a better job at marketing

PedroBatista 11mo ago
Build the “killer app” that the audience wants and needs and where D is the best lang to do it and justify the investment in learning yet another lang. I have no idea of what that is and nobody knows, it’s the universal problem of any product/lang/tech. Right place at the right time I guess
- WalterBright 11mo ago
  A killer app can be built in any language.
  - PedroBatista 11mo ago
    Of course it can, but different killer apps for a different crowd. A missile tracking system wouldn't be the kind of application to do in PHP. Wrong app, wrong crowd. I'm aware of D since it's inception more or less but don't know it very well. I would say D lacks a "bombastic" feature and maybe that's both the reason is not used more but also why is such a good language. It's not "memory safe" like Rust, yes it's fast but so is C/C++, it doesn't have the "massive parallelism/ always-on" robustness like Erlang. It has a bit of everything which is good and bad. Being a mid all-arounder is OK in my book, perhaps it's more a matter of some "post-AI" tech startup adopt it and get massive or famous, like Ruby because of the Web 2.0 era or Erlang with the Whatsapp thing. Maybe D is good the way it is and will always be there.
    - WalterBright 11mo ago
      D doesn't have a bombastic or killer feature. What it has is elegance. It simplifies things, and smooths out the ugly stuff. You don't have to worry if your char is signed or unsigned, or how many bits are in an int, or whether to use dot or arrow, or remember to make your destructor virtual, and on and on. It's a more memory safe language than C/C++, no need to worry about forward references, strong encapsulation, simple modules, and so on. And let's face it - the C preprocessor is an abomination in modern languages, why does it persist?
    - dolmen 11mo ago
      A missile tracking system is definitely a killer app.
brabel 11mo ago
I really like D and want to use D instead of Zig if I can... But it's difficult to do so! Nothing to do with marketing in my case, at least. The reasons are : * `dub` is badly documented and does dumb things like including test code in the generated binary. * `serve-d` is terrible. It can't handle even my little hello world programs - either crashes or consumes 100% CPU until I manually kill it. * MacOS support sucks. All the time I have problems: the linker didn't work for years (fixed now). Immediate segmentation faults currently (fixed in nightly AFAIK). C code using the new flat128 doesn't compile (I think it was fixed already?). Just constant frustration. * Too many features, many broken. It has an experimental borrow-checking feature, I tried to use it but it's largely undocumented. People in the Forum told me to that feature is completely unfinished. It has an allocators package as well, but no idea how I can make use of those like I would in Zig. Would love to see a well written post about that. Using D in betterC mode is what I am most interested about exactly because it looks more like Zig and C than Java - and performs much better. But currently, that means forgetting about Phobos, the standard library, as that's written exclusively with GC and Exceptions in mind. Maybe that's ok as you can just use all C libraries you want, but would be nice to have some D conveniences to make that worthwhile. Apart from that, I completely agree that D's comptime and metaprogramming is the best I've seen in any language (except for Lisp of course). All I need to keep using D is much better tooling and clarification about what parts of the language are "half-baked" (especially around DIP1000) and which parts are stable - perhaps "editions" will give us that, will check it out when it's ready. Oh and also top-notch MacOS support... I know that's a moving target but even Zig manages to handle that just fine, why not D?!
- WalterBright 11mo ago
  The borrow checker is there as experimental, it is not an official part of the language. It is unfinished due to lack of interest in it by the D community. I don't understand the special purpose behind Zig's allocators. It's just an interface. I make custom allocators in D all the time, it's trivial. Dip1000 is also an experimental feature and is not part of the core language. On a more pragmatic note, D has a notion of "sinks", aka output ranges. They provide a simple interface that accepts input, which is appended to the output range. Since the user of the sink has no idea what the sink is doing, just that it accepts input. This is a fun and very practical way to move the choice of how to allocate memory to the caller rather than the callee. gdc and ldc offer top notch D support for the Mac.
bnolsen 11mo ago
I don't think D brought enough new to the table. I had already been coding in c++ for a while and was getting tired of all the little things wrong with c++. While D cleaned up a few things it was already too complex for my taste. And the whole GC thing followed by the D2 fiasco and I lost interest. When dipping my toes into Rust I also got the same vibe from it that I had from D. Too much complexity built in. I guess that made me a sucker for Zig because it is able to combine simplicity, cleverness, clarity and high performance.

throwawaymaths 11mo ago

too many features. tryhard vibe

WalterBright 11mo ago
We're implementing "editions" in order to remove some features that don't deliver enough value.
- agumonkey 11mo ago
  how is the community going these days ? stable ? growing ?

Kapendev 11mo ago

Good question, but I don't think this is the place for that conversation :) And I say that as a Dlang fan :)

johnfn 11mo ago
Why would a comment suggesting to use D not be the place to have a conversation for why D doesn't see adoption?
- Kapendev 11mo ago
  You and Walter could do that, but this post is about some cool devs and their cool Zig project.
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    The title is "Why we built Lightpanda in Zig", i.e. language selection criteria. Comparing it with D is on topic.
bachmeier 11mo ago
Absolutely. Rust is the only language that's allowed to derail HN programming threads.

spiffytech 11mo ago

In part, the compiler wasn't fully FOSS until 2017.

WalterBright 11mo ago
The gdc and ldc compilers were fully FOSS around 2007. We were able to get dmd's backend license fixed in 2017.
- spiffytech 11mo ago
  Ah, I stand corrected!

soulbadguy 11mo ago

I think in many ways D was just too ahead of it's time; Packaging the same feature set and abstraction level of C++ in much cleaner and saner package wasn't really seen at valuable at that time. I think that if D were to be "re-release today" with a lighter syntax, and some coporate backing a-la GO/swift/typescript/carbon; It would find quite a bit of success.

auxym 11mo ago
Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release? No judgement against trying to monetize valuable work, but in this day and nearly everyone expects free and OSS compilers/interpreters and core tooling.
- bachmeier 11mo ago
  > Also wasn't the D compiler proprietary and a paid product for a long time after its initial release? The backend for the DMD compiler was not fully open source for a number of years. That's because Symantec owned some of the code and they were not willing to let it be relicensed. They did allow that in 2017. It was never a paid product AFAIK. Overall, that was beneficial to the D community. The GDC backend has always been open, and for some time has been part of GCC. The LDC backend was developed to use LLVM. It's possible that there would not have been motivation for those projects if DMD's backend had been open from the start. DMD compiles fast but the performance is not competitive with the other compilers if you're working on something that needs to push the CPU to its limits.
  - WalterBright 11mo ago
    I'm only able to work on the DMD backend now and then, and so it has fallen behind compilers with a small army working solely on a backend. Sadly, the number of people nerdly enough to want to work on a code generator is very, very small. Me, I find it quite enjoyable. I cannot even think of anyone who wrote a full stack compiler these days.

lenkite 11mo ago

> Why D sees low adoption? Most components of the D standard library (Phobos) use garbage collection by default (when I last checked). This unfortunately removes it as a contender in the same space as Zig and Rust. And once you move to the GC space, there are a truckload of GC languages - it is the non-GC ones that are rare. IMHO stdlib GC was one of the major barriers stopping D in the system programming space.