On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its
own thread. It's very important.
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I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies.
Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk
about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the
language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of
reasons:
* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential
users right off.
* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the
competition.
* Safety has holes and bugs.
* Hiring people who know D is a problem.
* Documentation and tutorials are weak.
* There's no web services framework (by this time many folks
know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even
heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle
vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum.
There wasn't enough interest.
* (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio
plugin, it doesn't exist.
* Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
* Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the
weaknesses above.
Hi,
to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
in my opinion D lacks std.decimal. Maybe some companies will
develop their
own decimal libraries but for the others they won't.
There is some great work, but currently it seems to be blocked by
std.bigint
https://github.com/andersonpd/eris/issues/6
For the tooling I can only speak for windows environment. To have
a sophisticated
IDE, the DLL topic needs some love. DLL are a major topic on
windows and without
sophisticated DLL support, it is hardly possible to build an
integrated IDE similar
to the well known like Visual Studio/Delphi/...
One major issue I faced, I create a class in a DLL and cannot
cast the class
in my main application to another type due to the missing type
info.
The workaround would be to have massive code duplication, which
makes the code more complex.
Also here some great work are already done but blocked by the
"export semantic" topic.
Kind regards
André
