On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 16:17:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Unless you articulate what your alternate plan is to make
things simpler, perhaps along with some github PRs or a DIP,
things will keep going as they are.
I don't think series of DIPs will change anything. First we need
to be close to consensus on what ought to be done better.
But since Swift has SIL and Rust is getting MIR, I'm starting to
think that it would be overall less work to build a new language
adopted to one of those than polishing Nim, Crystal and D... That
option didn't really exist before, and it won't resonate well
with D designers either.
But it is a reasonable strategy when languages seem to be
converging on semantics that are rather similar.
The basic question is: can you afford to compete?
Yes, if you reuse existing infrastructure, not only what exists,
but what is coming.
Your asm.js/WebAssembly target is a little different, but using
the web for such apps is just as dumb. There are good reasons
why mobile is ascendant and webapps on the downswing.
I don't think there is a downswing for web-apps.
you can optimize for one niche and do extremely well there, but
then you often find yourself stuck in that niche, as Go finds
itself today.
Being stuck in Go's niche would be a fantastic situation for D as
Go's market penetration might be 20x that of D. The main
limitation for Go is the Go language authors' vision and
attitudes. Not really related to the domain.
Which isn't D either, unless you include D because of the GC.
D2 appears to be going for ref counted ownership, so I assume
that the outcome will be that D2 becomes comparable to Swift with
ARC.
D2 might have trouble finding a key feature to market after Swift
adds hygienic macros. Depending on how they go about it.
