On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 13:14:46 UTC, Moritz Maxeiner wrote:
> Fifth time you are being intentionally inflammatory and trying to twist my post.

Well, i am sorry that you see it all as intentionally inflammatory.

You might have noticed that after responding to you, my post was more general. Not person specific. My apology to you for the misunderstanding.

I will not post about this anymore. No point wasting anybody there time. Its not like anything is going to change anyway, that much is now clear to me.

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 11:50:20 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:

>
> I am already far into my project with D but at the same time i can not help getting this nagging feeling that D has major issues beyond its base language. Mostly its community and structure. I see less of this with for instance Rust despite being a WAY younger language and audience. Its almost like D is stuck in the past, in some kind of pre-2000 C++ attitude. Like i said, maybe its me. D as a base language works but for such a old language ( lets be honest about that ), its a real struggle on the other areas beyond the language.

We don't notice the rivers carving the canyons in our brief lifespans, so would never know that it happened without some point of reference in the past to compare to. While D's progress doesn't move at such a glacial pace (thankfully!), it still won't be very noticeable to someone who hasn't been around here long enough. If you could move your point of reference back in time a bit, you'd know that a great deal of progress has been made.

That doesn't mean that such complaints aren't valid and shouldn't be raised, but it's nice to have some perspective to moderate your expectations. Progress *is* being made. The volunteer argument keeps coming up because that *is* the reality. There's no one around here who can snap their fingers and get a team of people to put their heads down and make improvements on a daily basis. Rust and Go, however, do have that benefit. So we move forward, bit-by-bit, slowly but surely.

I've been using D and coming to these forums since 2003 (and, by the way, using DMD on Windows without a hitch for all that time) and I can point to many periods in the intervening years when we passed major milestones. There used to be no IDE plugins at all. No installers. DMD was distributed in a single zip for all platforms. We had no build tools, no DUB, no web frameworks, a substandard standard library, a clunky web interface for the newsgroups... So please, don't take your snapshot view of the current state of affairs and take that as evidence that the rivers aren't carving the canyons, because they very much are.

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 13:30:21 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>
> On the other hand, maybe D is not meant for the kind of user who needs such an easy path.  What does it matter if you set D up really easily and then can't grasp such a sprawling, lower-level language?  Perhaps _this_ is the right packaging for D right now, to keep away the kinds of casual users who would not be suited for D.
>

Today I agree with that, but in 1-2 years when mir/lubeck are in better shape I'm probably going to disagree. Hoping someone packages something together like an Anaconda for D that just easily works.

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 13:54:54 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 13:14:46 UTC, Moritz Maxeiner wrote:
>> Fifth time you are being intentionally inflammatory and trying to twist my post.
>
> Well, i am sorry that you see it all as intentionally inflammatory.

Only those specific instances where you used expressions designed to elicit an emotional response.

>
> You might have noticed that after responding to you, my post was more general. Not person specific. My apology to you for the misunderstanding.

The trouble is that you replied to two different people in the same post (this is btw not very well supported by newsgroups, for which the forum is a frontend) and even after becoming more general kept referring to points I made in my post.

>
> I will not post about this anymore.

That is your choice, though I fail to see why you think you shouldn't.
I think you should keep reporting such issues in the ecosystem, since without that there is indeed no way they are ever going to be dealt with. It's just that reporting in and of itself does not guarantee a fix with our current human resources. If you want such a guarantee, it's on you to convince someone (be that yourself or someone else) to do it.

> No point wasting anybody there time. Its not like anything is going to change anyway, that much is now clear to me.

It shouldn't, because it's not the case. The ecosystem is being worked on, albeit slowly. No progress != slow progress.

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> D needs to just work!


I think that D is quickly gaining increasingly picky and demanding users because it's breaking out in the general programmer population.

Not all of these programmers have used C++ and perhaps have higher expectations when it comes to "just work".

If you look at the complaints from 8 years ago (where ragequitting D was more common), everyone of their points have be adressed, and most things have improved.

Perhaps complaints are poised to get higher in intensity precisely because things have become better ;)

On Fri, 2017-06-16 at 15:08 +0000, Guillaume Piolat via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 03:53:18 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> > D needs to just work!
> 
> 
> I think that D is quickly gaining increasingly picky and demanding users because it's breaking out in the general programmer population.
> 
> Not all of these programmers have used C++ and perhaps have higher expectations when it comes to "just work".
> 
> If you look at the complaints from 8 years ago (where ragequitting D was more common), everyone of their points have be adressed, and most things have improved.
> 
> Perhaps complaints are poised to get higher in intensity precisely because things have become better ;)
> 

The corollary is that The D Foundation has to make sure the D experience (DMD, RDMD, LDC, LDMD, GDC, GDMD, Dub, etc.) works out of the box, either with a downloader or a Chocolatey package on Windows; downloader, MacPorts and Homebrew on MacOS, and packaging for Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc.

Most of it is there, but it isn't as slick an experience as say Rust and Go. It about being a good and proactive downstream for all the packaging systems (which is mostly there) and having good installers where needed, mostly there. I suspect a big part of the difficulty is resources, but it is also having three tool chains. Clearly Rust and Go have people paid (directly or indirectly) to deal with front of house, customer facing stuff. D has some volunteers most of whom are back office, just want to get on with code please type people.

If it is true that there is increased traction for D, then getting some resource into the front of house stuff will be critical to that traction fading and disappearing.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Friday, 16 June 2017 at 15:47:15 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> If it is true that there is increased traction for D, then getting some resource into the front of house stuff will be critical to that traction fading and disappearing.

Yes, daily downloads of dmd are up 25-30% this year:

http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

On Fri, 2017-06-16 at 16:47 +0100, Russel Winder wrote:
> 
[…]
> If it is true that there is increased traction for D, then getting
> some
> resource into the front of house stuff will be critical to that
> traction fading and disappearing.

s/to that/to avoid that/

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 2017-06-16 09:53, Mike B Johnson wrote:
>> DVM [1] is doing some of this.
>
> Cool, does it keep things well organized

It depends on what you definition of organized. DVM is a tool that allows you to easily install D compilers. It also allows to easily switch between multiple versions of the compiler. That is, you can have one window (terminal) with one version and another window with another version.

On Posix it installs everything ~/.dvm. Each compiler is placed in its own directory, it's mostly the zip archives available on dlang.org unpacked. Here's an example of how the directory structure looks like on Posix:

$ tree -L 2 .dvm
.dvm
├── archives
│   ├── dmd.2.073.0.osx.zip
│   ├── dmd.2.074.0-b1.osx.zip
│   └── dmd.2.074.0.osx.zip
├── bin
│   ├── dmd-2.073.0
│   ├── dmd-2.074.0
│   ├── dmd-2.074.0-b1
│   ├── dvm
│   ├── dvm-current-dc
│   ├── dvm-default-dc
├── compilers
│   ├── dmd-2.073.0
│   ├── dmd-2.074.0
│   ├── dmd-2.074.0-b1
├── env
│   ├── default
│   ├── dmd-2.073.0
│   ├── dmd-2.074.0
│   ├── dmd-2.074.0-b1
└── scripts
    └── dvm

> and deals with windows issues(link.exe., dlls, etc) or just uses the "D way" which is a hairball?

I'm not that familiar with Windows (the Windows support was contributed by another developer) so I'm not sure which issues you refer to.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2017-06-16 17:47, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d wrote:

> Most of it is there, but it isn't as slick an experience as say Rust
> and Go. It about being a good and proactive downstream for all the
> packaging systems (which is mostly there) and having good installers
> where needed, mostly there. I suspect a big part of the difficulty is
> resources, but it is also having three tool chains. Clearly Rust and Go
> have people paid (directly or indirectly) to deal with front of house,
> customer facing stuff. D has some volunteers most of whom are back
> office, just want to get on with code please type people.

Also, IIRC, Go uses its own tool chain, i.e. not relying on system compiler and linker. This can help as well since you have more control over the tool chain.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg