On Saturday, 20 December 2014 at 17:40:06 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
Just wondering what the general sentiment is.
For me it's these 3 points.
- tuple support (DIP32, maybe without pattern matching)
- working import, protection and visibility rules (DIP22, 313,
314)
- finishing non-GC memory management
There is no "feature complete" language. What makes mainstream
languages more likely candidates for future software projects is
the fact that they are properly maintained by a team of
professionals language community trusts.
I can give Java and C++ as perfect examples. (I am doing this
mostly because these two are what I used most of the time in my
professional career)
- None of them is "feature complete", yet they are most likely
candidate languages for many future software projects. Why? I
believe the major reason why is that there is a well-defined
standardization process, and what is more important, there are
companies behind these languages. Naturally, this makes the new
features come to the language *extremely slowly* (we talk 10+
years here).
Perhaps the best course of action is to extract the stable
features that D has now, and fork a stable branch that is
maintained by people who are actually using that stable version
of D in *their products*. This is crucial because it is in their
own interest to have this branch as stable as possible.
"Problem" with D is that it is pragmatic language, and this
"problem" is why I love D. The reason I say it is a problem is
because there are subcommunities and people with their own view
on how things "should be". Examples are numerous: GC vs noGC,
functional vs OOP, pro- and anti- heavily templated D code. Point
is - it is hard to satisfy all.
