On Saturday, 14 December 2013 at 19:46:36 UTC, Ola Fosheim
Grøstad wrote:
Do you think I am unfair?
I don't think it's a matter of fair or unfair. If a use-case for
D doesn't stand out for you, that's your call.
What I do think is that a lot of your arguments are either fairly
abstract theoretical ones, or impressions based on a fairly
limited amount of experience at a time when D was much less
developed compared to where it is today. Bear in mind you're
speaking to someone who had a similar initial experience -- "Hmm,
this seems pretty cool but doesn't give me the performance I need
and get from C++, file it as 'one to watch'..." and has since
come back to the language and used it extensively. (For me it
was the availability of a D2-supporting GDC in Ubuntu 12.04 that
did it: ease of access combined with performance on par with C++.)
Your contention about fragmentation due to the 3 compilers is, I
think, objectively false, however. On the contrary, what
differences there are have been continuously narrowing for the
whole period of time that I've been actively using D, to the
point where pretty soon the frontends of GDC, LDC and DMD will be
100% identical code.
Oh, and -- I can't see that rewriting the compilers to output to
C++ would really be easier than just implementing better direct
support for interfacing with C++ in the language. It honestly
just seems like a good way to introduce a new opportunity for
difficulty in debugging performance issues.
Bottom line -- with any language there is a hurdle of initial use
that has to be jumped before one can really evaluate its
practical usefulness. If what you see in D today doesn't
convince you that it's worth trying to take that jump a second
time, then that's your judgement to make. But I think you might
get more out of spending a couple of hours trying things out in a
playful way, rather than writing long emails debating fairly
abstract philosophical ideas and desires for the language.
TL;DR I don't think it matters whether you're fair to D or not,
but it matters that you're fair to yourself in giving yourself
the chance to properly assess what D can do for you today :-)
