On 03/10/2018 05:47 AM, Dylan Graham wrote:
On Saturday, 10 March 2018 at 10:05:49 UTC, rumbu wrote:
According to the State of D Survey, 71% of the respondents don't care
about betterC. Why is betterC on the priority list?
Yeah. Why should D worry about tying itself into C when it can't even
interface with itself through DLLs?
First of all, betterC is about far more than interfacing with C. In
fact, interop with C isn't really what betterC is about at all - that's
a separate aspect of the language. (And those C/C++ users who still
haven't come to D - for many of them the holdout is *because* of the
issues betterC aims to address. Make no mistake, for all the stockholm
syndrome in the C and C++ worlds, there *are* a lot people openly
wanting to jump ship but don't have a sufficient option yet. Heck, *I'm*
a C/C++ -> D convert.)
But more importantly:
The D language itself is specifically designed and intended to be
multi-purpose. Because of that, D users (and potential D users) are
*highly* diverse. Everybody here has their own use-cases, their own
needs and priorities, and their own list of things they want fixed
yesterday.
In a group this diverse, there just simply *isn't* much on the D
wishlist that's crucially important to a *majority*, because we all need
completely different things.
Personally, better DLL support have little to no impact on me. Obviously
it does for you, and I sympathise. Some of the things most important to
me for D to improve you probably wouldn't care one bit about - and
that's ok. We work on different sorts of things.
Improved betterC is something I would find very nice if I ever have time
or opportunity to get back into embedded software. But outside of that,
yea, it doesn't impact me much more than it does for you.
But here's the rub: In this crowd here, probably far more than most
languages, we all have such wildly varying needs that 29% *is* what
qualifies as significant around here. Most wishlist items are going to
have similarly non-majority numbers. And they have to pick *something*
to focus on. Luckily, as the vision document clearly states, there are
*several* such "somethings" the dlang foundation is committing to
working on.
