On Monday, 18 January 2021 at 15:18:40 UTC, aberba wrote:
From my experiencing freelancing, I've come to see that a large portion of clients' decision stems from other things like familiarity and ecosystem (packages, frameworks, vendor/cloud support, engineering hiring pool, consultants/support availability, tooling, marketing/popularity/fomo/community, etc)... including things that usually comes from the community and stakeholders. For D we don't really have any measure of community size. Only looking at the forum can be misleading.
I agree. Ecosystem is one of the most important things to take the choice. In particular, when a team of developers need to engage a new project they don't just talk about language: they talk about process model, frameworks, libraries... and tooling for solving common development/testing/deployment tasks (i.e.: debugging).
Go and Rust are really clever about its paradigms decisions and no one (as far as I perceive) is discussing if GC must be removed from Go or added to Rust: developers see what language offers them and they decide.
D toke it's key decisions in the past: of course it is a "generalist" language trying to convince C or C++ developers, but this is really frustrating when there is no a way to perform decent debugging in linux with vscode (like https://youtu.be/X2tM21nmzfk?t=352) while the community is dedicated to discussing the sex of angels (multiple inheritance, GC/no GC, exceptions/no exceptions, ...).
A good friend developer told me months ago: "If you are experienced with Node, C# or Scala and you expect to find their functionalities in other language like D, you just will get frustrated: adapt to what the language offers you or jump to other options".
D is D: take it or not. This language is not the holy grail. If D is not C++ and you love to work with C++, just work with C++ (or take a try with Rust and it's Ownership memory model if D pros are not enough for you). If D is not C and you love to work with C, just work with C (or take a try with Go and it's GC if D is not enough for you), but think about the thousands of experienced developers that where looking for something mature to work with and found that D was not an option.
Also maybe the GC and other complaints (genuine or not), which I'm also a culprit, might actually be a contributing to people's first impression of D when they visit the forums. I have a strongly suspicious of this.
Me too: I'm absolutely convinced.
