I've actually been thinking about D's future and what its killer
applications could very well be.
I actually don't believe in gui apps is D's strong point. Even if
we get a gui lib sorted out. The only exception I see for this is
an IDE which supports a good few languages, Java, c/c++, asm,
lua, python, D. Just to name a few. Probably R as well.
Maybe little console utility apps would do well. Phobos has a wee
way to go before that is doable in most cases.
Game development definitely. But for that we need somebody to
actually build a pretty good game engine and then show it off
using a game.
Server infrastructure. Well thats been proven already. Thank you
Sociomantic.
Lastly web development. This I believe to be our biggest chance.
With Java going down hill we can take over a lot of development
that would have gone into JSP apps.
We actually have a good language for it. Which I was very unsure
about when I started using it for that.
There is three different times in a D app that you can do init
and overhead stuff. Compile time, start of runtime and during
runtime (aka when you need it). PHP only has during runtime (more
of less when you need it). Java has on init (so start) and when
you need it.
This is an absolutely amazing thing that I can't stress enough to
being great for web development. Huge amount of processing can be
taken out of a website during runtime.
There is a big down side to this though. It takes longer to do
something like an ORM. Just basic mapping takes longer. As we
have so much more to take in.
I think web development is where our biggest potential is for.
Not actually scientific or mathematical in nature.
Because of this, part of my design with DOOGLE is to make the
abstraction in such a way that it should be possible to build
almost identical (in code) desktop and web apps. If we had this
alone, things like IDE's would become very attractive to dev's.
Write one interface in code and have it usable in whole bunch of
mediums.
Because of the web development nature, there is one specific
project I believe to be key to show this off. A CMS. But to do
this effectively we need things like a good router, ORM and all
that type of thing. Not to mention lack of sql based database
support in vibe currently.
