On Tuesday, 18 March 2014 at 18:34:14 UTC, bearophile wrote:
In this phase of D life commercial developers can't justify to have the language so frozen that you can't perform reasonable improvements as the one discussed in this thread.
I don't disagree, but D is suffering from not having a production ready compiler/runtime with a solid optimizing backend in maintenance mode. So it is giving other languages "free traction" rather than securing its own position.
I think there is a bit too much focus on standard libraries, because not having libraries does not prevent commercial adoption. Commercial devs can write their own C-bindings if the core language, compiler and runtime is solid. If the latter is not solid then only commercial devs that can commit lots of resources to D will pick it up and keep using it (basically the ones that are willing to turn themselves into D shops).
Perhaps also D2 was announced too early, and then people jumped onto it expecting it to come about "real soon". Hopefully the language designers will do D3 design on paper behind closed doors for a while before announcing progress and perhaps even deliberately keep it at gamma/alpha quality in order to prevent devs jumping ship to D2 prematurely. :-)
That is how I view it, anyway.
