But the later seems to be the same as it was. Yeah, DMD can
generate x86_64 nowadays which I remember was a long time
pending issue some while back and I can find `gdc` in the
Ubuntu repository, which is huge improvement, but overall the
impression is the same: D is Windows-centric.
It seems to me that because historically D was Windows-centric,
because Walter is Windows user, for all this years Windows
developers had easier time when playing with D, than Linux
devs. And after all this years, D community is mostly
Windows-centric. Have anyone did any poll regarding this? I am
guessing, I may be wrong.
Each time I fell the urge to play with D in the free time and
want to test newest, coolest features and projects written in
D, I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library
incompatibilities, path incompatibilities. I toy with a lot of
languages and I never hit issues like this with eg. Rust or Go,
which fall into similar category of programming languages. Both
of them seem to be developed for Linux/Unix - first, Windows
later.
Well, there's at least a significant chunk of the community on
Linux, judging by the LDC and GDC projects. I haven't had any
major problems on Linux (I use Arch Linux), and DMD gets regular
testing on Linux: http://d.puremagic.com/test-results/ (it even
gets tested on FreeBSD =D). LDC's CI (travis-ci) only supports
Linux, and Windows support is in an alpha state.
A while ago I tried D on Windows and it wasn't nearly as nice as
running on Linux. I don't use very many libraries (just some C
bindings) and my projects aren't very complicated, so perhaps I
haven't gotten to the point you're describing.
So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers:
please install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe
Fedora too and see for yourself is your project is easy to
install and working each time you release it.
I can agree with this, but there also aren't very many
high-profile D libraries. Most developers seem to write something
to scratch their own itch, and kudos if it happens to work for
you.
I would like to see a stronger library management solution, but
there currently isn't a "standard" build tool (except maybe DSSS,
but it seems abandoned). There's also dub
(https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/dub), which looks promising
or orbit (https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit). Maybe the
community will settle on one and this problem will magically go
away?
In my opinion in the last 15 years most of the noticeable, long
lasting programming software improvements came from Linux/Mac
world (Unix, generally speaking), but I am biased. But the fact
is: Open Source and Linux is where young, eager to learn and
risk devs and cool kids are. In great numbers. Embrace them,
just like Open, Collaborative development model and you'll
quickly see a lot of new cool projects, developers, bug fixes
and buzz. :)
I agree, but this also depends on your target market. For
Windows, I guess you've forgotten .NET?
A lot of the D community came from C++, and AFAICT Windows nearly
dominates the commercial C++ market. All those C++ developers who
got tired of C++'s warts came to D. Many other languages (Go,
Ruby, Python, etc) are developed for users coming from C, Perl
and Java, which have traditionally been *nix or cross-platform,
so naturally development would happen on the platform they know
better.
That being said, D has pretty strong Linux support, and from what
I've seen in the community, even the Windows users have a pretty
solid knowledge of Linux; moreso than many other open-source
programming language projects (many are ignorant of everything
Windows).
Personally, I think it's refreshing to have such strong Windows
support, so when I need to make my project work on Windows, I
know there's solid support in the community. Moving a node.js app
from Linux to Windows was a bug-riddled experience because many
of the libs didn't have proper Windows support (paths were just
the tip of the iceburg).
PS. Kudos for whole D community, the language is even better
and more impressive then it used to be.
I'm in a similar boat. I come back to the D community every few
months and check back, and each time I run into less and less
problems. There are still a lot of annoying things (CTFE, the
garbage collector, no package manager), but these seem to be
under pretty heavy development.
Anyway, with the last couple of releases, I now feel comfortable
recommending D to my friends. If D had a nice, stupid-simple
build process (like Go's), then I may even become a fanboy. =D
