On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 01:02:40 UTC, Rikki Cattermole
wrote:
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.
Yeah, D doesn't seem to have any great success stories on the GUI
front, though there have been some apps.
Maybe little console utility apps would do well. Phobos has a
wee way to go before that is doable in most cases.
Perhaps a port of busybox or Android's toolbox utilities to D
would be a good demo:
https://android.googlesource.com/platform/system/core/+/master/toolbox/
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.
Benjamin Thaut wrote a nice game demo, there may be more out
there:
http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/?p=20
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.
The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them. This
is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not C++. I
think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better to focus on
native GUI apps, especially on mobile. Vibe.d is a great
project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the wider web dev
community.
The great thing about D is that it would be a good base for
creating completely new tools and technologies. That is why it
is tough to imagine what will bubble up, as it will be up to the
imagination of the D programmer.
However, getting D going on mobile might be important, as that
seems to be where all the creativity is these days. Paul
Thurrott keeps pointing out that the top two installed Windows
apps are Chrome and iTunes, both of which exist to take users
away from Windows to other platforms:
http://windowsitpro.com/windows-8/windows-desktop-death
The rest of the top 10 are all "system utilities that include
antivirus/malware applications and those silly little tools that
make Windows 8 look and work more like Windows 7." If desktop
computers and Windows are dying and mobile is the future, D needs
to be on mobile, especially since D will be more efficient and
better-suited to mobile constraints.
