On Sunday, 3 July 2016 at 06:23:05 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
Thanks for taking the time to write this. Let me see if I can help.
Wow, this was very well handled. Thanks for keeping your head cool and answering in a constructive, friendly and informative manner. It's even more admirable coming from someone who says he used not to be exactly the most "people person" / good boss / group leader, or whatever the expression was.
Sometimes I idly wonder what would have happened if D were available in the 80's. Sort of like if you put a modern car for sale in the 1960's.
I've also thought about that from time to time. I think D would have been very "mainstream-successful". Starting from where it actually started, I think things have worked out well for D, despite its still limited success. Looking back all of these years I think that D's marketing mistake was the garbage collection. Given its target audience and design trade-offs, I believe adoption of the language was disproportionally affected by that choice. If D had started with stronger support for nogc, even at the cost of delaying some other nice features, I believe adoption would have been quite stronger (and more easily snowballed) -- irrespective of the actual engineering merit of that D variant vs the true D. (it would also have avoided all the current piecemeal work of trying to remove GC allocation from Phobos, etc.; also, notice that nogc marketing would probably have been even more important in the 80s).
