Exactly. C++ support is of no interest at all, and GC is
something we contribute to, rather than something we expect
from the community.
Interestingly we don't even care much about libraries, we've
done everything ourselves.
So what do we care about? Mainly, we care about improving the
core product.
In general I think that in D we have always suffered from
spreading ourselves too thin. We've always had a bunch of cool
new features that don't actually work properly. Always, the
focus shifts to something else, before the previous feature was
finished.
At Sociomantic, we've been successful in our industry using
only the features of D1. We're restricted to using D's features
from 2007!! Feature-wise, practically nothing from the last
seven years has helped us!
With something like C++ support, it's only going to win
companies over when it is essentially complete. That means that
working on it is a huge investment that doesn't start to pay
for itself for a very long time. So although it's a great goal,
with a huge potential payoff, I don't think that it should be
consuming a whole lot of energy right now.
And personally, I doubt that many companies would use D, even
if with perfect C++ interop, if the toolchain stayed at the
current level.
As I said in my Dconf 2013 talk -- I advocate a focus on Return
On Investment.
I'd love to see us chasing the easy wins.
disclaimer: i am rather new to D and thus have a bit of a distant
view.
i think the above touches an important point. One thing GO does
right is that they focused on feature rich stdlib/library
ecosystem even though the language was very young. i'm coming
from Ruby/Python and the reason i use those languages is that
they have two things:
a) they are fun to use (as andrei said in the floss interview:
the creators had "taste").
b) huge set of libs that help me to get stuff done.
now i think a) is fine, but with b) i am not sure if the strategy
to get full C/C++ interop will not take too long and scare those
people off that are not coming from C/C++.
i think D is a fantastic tool to write expressive, fast and
readable code. I don't need much more language features (again,
look at GO...) but a solid foundation of libs to gain
"competitive advantage" in my daily work.
