I'm not going to fill out the questionnaire because I'm not at a
company and have not tried Mir, but two points about what Nick
and Mike wrote.
On Wednesday, 8 February 2017 at 20:40:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
Coercion (and perceived coercion[1] for that matter) makes
technologies popular far more than any other factor. The
computing sector is NOT a meritocracy, not by a longshot. That
right there is D's #1 biggest marketing flaw, period. If you
nail that coercion part, it doesn't matter HOW badly you do on
any other technical or marketing aspect. Been proven time and
time again. And if you DON'T have that coercion, you face an
uphill battle no matter how good you do on technical and
marketing fronts. Also been proven time and time again.
I agree that "coercion," or more accurately the tyranny of the
default, is the dominant factor in language popularity even
today, but you're reaching when you apply that to web frameworks
too. As you admit, rails didn't become as big as it might have
because there were quickly many other web frameworks, ie
languages and frameworks on the server are very competitive and
that market is very fragmented, though PHP is likely the biggest.
D's problem on the client is that the popular platforms are still
very much tied to certain favored languages:
iOS - ObjC and Swift
Android non-game apps - Java
Android games - C/C++
Windows - C# or C++
Web - Javascript
Three of the four major client platforms all allow other
languages (with the fourth starting to with WebAssembly), but
you're often fighting the tide if you choose a non-default
language so most don't bother.
We can make the dev experience more pleasant on those platforms,
as I believe has happened now that we support the MS toolchain on
Windows, but D is unlikely to become popular without a killer app
that demonstrates its suitability. That's not coercion, but
something we can actually control.
On Thursday, 9 February 2017 at 00:30:53 UTC, Mike wrote:
I think the D leadership are too busy addressing broader issues
with the language at the moment, so this specific case is just
not a high priority. Also, if it's not a priority to the them,
then anyone that does attempt to work on it will just suffer an
eternity in pull request purgatory.
So, I would not recommend it as a project for anyone until the
D leadership decides to get involved.
I think this misunderstands how open source works: the whole
point is that you don't need anybody's permission to go do this.
Walter and Andrei, or any other OSS core team, are much more
likely to approve something if you have an implementation that
works well. Look at Ilya and what happened after he showed them
Mir.
Now, you may not want to go do this on your own if you believe
it's a lot of effort, could use a design the core team may not
approve, and don't want to maintain or develop your own fork
indefinitely, but that's a lot of "if"s. I doubt it would be a
lot of effort to strip D down like this, but I have not looked
into it.
