4 ms·
In my opinion the fact that there were two competing standard libraries (Tango and Phobos) certainly brought confusion and needlessly fragmented the community.
by lvillani 12y ago
In my opinion the fact that there were two competing standard libraries (Tango and Phobos) certainly brought confusion and needlessly fragmented the community.
IIRC, at the beginning the whole thing was not being developed in the open and the compiler was proprietary (although the front-end became open source at one point).
Those two things (especially the former) pretty much killed it for me.
D finally matured at a time where I was already more interested and invested in the Lisp/ML family of languages, thus I ended up never considering it for a project.
- simcop2387 12y agoThose were definitely the two things that kept me from really considering it in the past. Both of those have now changed for the better and there's a more active community building up again. I think the facebook use of D has also brought some much needed attention to it to the point where the language itself is starting to accelerate changes to move forward. The DMD reference compiler still has some restrictions on the backend of it I think but because of the frontend being available there's now LDC and GDC that are LLVM and GCC versions of the compiler that do much better at optimizing and are fully open source anyway. It's also seemed to help find bugs in both the language spec and the DMD backend from what i've read on the news groups because they've got three very different implementations of the language now that are all mostly compatible (the DMD version is always a little ahead since the other two are essentially ports of it to LLVM/GCC).
- WalterBright 12y agoThe D front end was just relicensed from GPL to Boost. (The front end is shared by DMD, GDC, and LDC.)
- simcop2387 12y agoI knew something had changed but was unsure of the details. Thanks for the correction.