On Thu, 2018-10-11 at 13:00 +0000, bachmeier via Digitalmars-d wrote: […] > Suggestions? > > My guess is that the reason they've heard of those languages is > because their developers were writing small projects using Go and > Rust, but not D.
I fear it may already be too late. Go, and now Rust, got marketing hype from an organisation putting considerable resources into the projects. This turned into effort from the community that increased rapidly, turning the hype into frameworks and libraries, and word of mouth marketing. It is the libraries and frameworks that make for traction. Now the hype is gone, Go and Rust, and their libraries and frameworks, are well positioned and with significant penetration into the minds of developers. Talk to Java developers and they have heard of Go and Rust, but not D. Go is more likely to them because of Docker and the context of The Web, for which Go has a strong pitch. They have heard of Rust but usually see it as not relevant to them, despite Firefox. Talk to Python developers and they know of Go, many of them of Rust, but almost never D. C and C++ are seen as the languages of performance extensions, though Rust increasingly has a play there. D has vibe.d, PyD, GtkD, and lots of other bits, but they've never quite had the resources of the equivalents in Go and Rust. Also the D community as a whole is effectively introvert, whereas Go and Rust communities have been quite extrovert. "Build it and they will come" just doesn't work, you have to be pushy and market stuff, often using guerilla marketing, to get mindshare. D has an excellent position against Python (for speed of development but without the performance hit) but no chance of penetrating the places where Python is strong due to lack of libraries and frameworks that people use – cf. Pandas, SciKit.Learn, etc. D has an excellent position against Go as a language except that Go has goroutines and channels. The single threaded event loop and callback approach is losing favour. Kotlin is introducing Kotlin Coroutines which is a step on from the observables system of Rx. Structured concurrency abstracting away from fibres and threadpools. Java may well get this via Project Loom which is Quasar being inserted into the JVM directly. Whatever D has it doesn't seem to be going to compete in this space. D without the GC has a sort of position against Rust, but I think that battle has been lost. Rust has won in the "the new C that isn't Go and doesn't have a garbage collector, and isn't C++, but does have all the nice monads stuff, oh and memory safety mostly". When it comes down to it D will carry on as a niche language loved by a few unknown to most. -- Russel. =========================================== Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk
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