On Tuesday, 11 April 2017 at 19:57:19 UTC, Piotr Kowalski wrote:
Hello D community,
I am language polyglot that lately got interested in D. I love
it, it's very elegant language, so simple and so powerful same
time. I will write some thoughts as outsider.
The reason I am looking at D in 2017 is that D it's almost
nonexistent on popular sites for programmers (reddit/HN etc).
The only discussion I remember about D was that it had two
standard libraries and there were no consensus on which to use
and that it uses GC so it's slow.
In my opinion D can get traction but it needs a lot more
marketing and people need to be more vocal about blog posts
written about D usage. If you don't have account on Reddit or
HackerNews, create one, upvote articles about D, answer
questions about D in comments, promote D (without zealotry).
Two other important things to change people minds about D
performance:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/
Why D is not there?
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/previews/round14/#section=data-r14&hw=ph&test=plaintext
This is another very popular benchmark that people discuss and
can attract new people to look at D. vibe.d here is not
working, it would be good to fix that.
What is the plan for D for next 5 years? What about RAII?
Did you consider implementing solutions from which we could get
memory safety without GC in D? Static analysis combined with
some additional annotations/rules (but not intrusive).
For example using some of the solutions from Cyclone[1] or Rust
or proposed solutions for lifetimes in C++[2]
[1]
http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/cyclone/papers/cyclone-safety.pdf
[2]
https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/docs/Lifetimes%20I%20and%20II%20-%20v0.9.1.pdf
The memory safety is currently in the works.
We just have one std-lib now.
GC is slow, yes.
The short-term solution is to avoid it.
(All gc-ed langauges recommend static preallocation :P)
