Hi,

I've been following D development for quite a bit of years now and it have always been the case that Linux was a second (or even third) class citizen in D-Lang world.

I've always wondered when D is going to mature and gain more popularity and always attributed the problems with D catching up mostly for two things:

* that it's was essentially developed by one man only;
* that it neglected Linux;

The first issue have changed some while ago, and I was very happy to hear that finally Walter somewhat embraced more distributed and open development model. "D on github? Hell must have frozen over." -- I thought. And I think everyone could quickly see the results. Each of the latest releases seem like a big leap forward, not just small set improvements.

But the later seems to be the same as it was. Yeah, DMD can generate x86_64 nowadays which I remember was a long time pending issue some while back and I can find `gdc` in the Ubuntu repository, which is huge improvement, but overall the impression is the same: D is Windows-centric.

It seems to me that because historically D was Windows-centric, because Walter is Windows user, for all this years Windows developers had easier time when playing with D, than Linux devs. And after all this years, D community is mostly Windows-centric. Have anyone did any poll regarding this? I am guessing, I may be wrong.

Each time I fell the urge to play with D in the free time and want to test newest, coolest features and projects written in D, I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library incompatibilities, path incompatibilities. I toy with a lot of languages and I never hit issues like this with eg. Rust or Go, which fall into similar category of programming languages. Both of them seem to be developed for Linux/Unix - first, Windows later.

So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers: please install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe Fedora too and see for yourself is your project is easy to install and working each time you release it.

In my opinion in the last 15 years most of the noticeable, long lasting programming software improvements came from Linux/Mac world (Unix, generally speaking), but I am biased. But the fact is: Open Source and Linux is where young, eager to learn and risk devs and cool kids are. In great numbers. Embrace them, just like Open, Collaborative development model and you'll quickly see a lot of new cool projects, developers, bug fixes and buzz. :)

PS. Kudos for whole D community, the language is even better and more impressive then it used to be.

> But the later seems to be the same as it was. Yeah, DMD can generate x86_64 nowadays which I remember was a long time pending issue some while back and I can find `gdc` in the Ubuntu repository, which is huge improvement, but overall the impression is the same: D is Windows-centric.
>
> It seems to me that because historically D was Windows-centric, because Walter is Windows user, for all this years Windows developers had easier time when playing with D, than Linux devs. And after all this years, D community is mostly Windows-centric. Have anyone did any poll regarding this? I am guessing, I may be wrong.
>
> Each time I fell the urge to play with D in the free time and want to test newest, coolest features and projects written in D, I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library incompatibilities, path incompatibilities. I toy with a lot of languages and I never hit issues like this with eg. Rust or Go, which fall into similar category of programming languages. Both of them seem to be developed for Linux/Unix - first, Windows later.

Well, there's at least a significant chunk of the community on Linux, judging by the LDC and GDC projects. I haven't had any major problems on Linux (I use Arch Linux), and DMD gets regular testing on Linux: http://d.puremagic.com/test-results/ (it even gets tested on FreeBSD =D). LDC's CI (travis-ci) only supports Linux, and Windows support is in an alpha state.

A while ago I tried D on Windows and it wasn't nearly as nice as running on Linux. I don't use very many libraries (just some C bindings) and my projects aren't very complicated, so perhaps I haven't gotten to the point you're describing.

> So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers: please install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe Fedora too and see for yourself is your project is easy to install and working each time you release it.

I can agree with this, but there also aren't very many high-profile D libraries. Most developers seem to write something to scratch their own itch, and kudos if it happens to work for you.

I would like to see a stronger library management solution, but there currently isn't a "standard" build tool (except maybe DSSS, but it seems abandoned). There's also dub (https://github.com/rejectedsoftware/dub), which looks promising or orbit (https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit). Maybe the community will settle on one and this problem will magically go away?

> In my opinion in the last 15 years most of the noticeable, long lasting programming software improvements came from Linux/Mac world (Unix, generally speaking), but I am biased. But the fact is: Open Source and Linux is where young, eager to learn and risk devs and cool kids are. In great numbers. Embrace them, just like Open, Collaborative development model and you'll quickly see a lot of new cool projects, developers, bug fixes and buzz. :)

I agree, but this also depends on your target market. For Windows, I guess you've forgotten .NET?

A lot of the D community came from C++, and AFAICT Windows nearly dominates the commercial C++ market. All those C++ developers who got tired of C++'s warts came to D. Many other languages (Go, Ruby, Python, etc) are developed for users coming from C, Perl and Java, which have traditionally been *nix or cross-platform, so naturally development would happen on the platform they know better.

That being said, D has pretty strong Linux support, and from what I've seen in the community, even the Windows users have a pretty solid knowledge of Linux; moreso than many other open-source programming language projects (many are ignorant of everything Windows).

Personally, I think it's refreshing to have such strong Windows support, so when I need to make my project work on Windows, I know there's solid support in the community. Moving a node.js app from Linux to Windows was a bug-riddled experience because many of the libs didn't have proper Windows support (paths were just the tip of the iceburg).

> PS. Kudos for whole D community, the language is even better and more impressive then it used to be.

I'm in a similar boat. I come back to the D community every few months and check back, and each time I run into less and less problems. There are still a lot of annoying things (CTFE, the garbage collector, no package manager), but these seem to be under pretty heavy development.

Anyway, with the last couple of releases, I now feel comfortable recommending D to my friends. If D had a nice, stupid-simple build process (like Go's), then I may even become a fanboy. =D

On Sunday, 16 June 2013 at 03:25:19 UTC, Dawid Ciężarkiewicz wrote:
> So I'd really like to ask all Windows-users D-developers: please install Virtual Box, latest Ubuntu guest inside, maybe Fedora too and see for yourself is your project is easy to install and working each time you release it.

Hi, no offense but your post comes to me like overly-biased flamebait. As a Windows user, my experience is quite opposite - most D users and developers are not using Windows, so Windows support was lagging behind in many instances. x64 came to Windows last. The Windows compiler is up to twice as slow than the Linux compiler (because it's compiled with DMC). The coverage of the OS API in the standard library/Druntime is underwhelming. GDC and LDC are starting to officially support Windows only just now.

In contrast, deploying my D software on Linux servers is quite painless and straight-forward.

Saying that D is neglecting Linux is an outright fabrication.

I use D on both Windows and Linux and I've *never* felt that D seemed Windows-centric, nor have I ever had Linux-centric problems with it.

On Sunday, 16 June 2013 at 03:25:19 UTC, Dawid Ciężarkiewicz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been following D development for quite a bit of years now and it have always been the case that Linux was a second (or even third) class citizen in D-Lang world.

My main use of D has been Linux. Work is being done on shared libraries which has probably been the biggest missing support, but I think Windows has also had to bear some of it.

Is it merely the lack of a dmd package in different distributions? Linux receive 64-bit support long before Windows.

As for third party libraries, I'd say if it doesn't work for you in Linux, it also isn't working in Windows (Assuming it isn't a Windows library like Juno).

Well, I can't tell much about the Windows experience, so might be that my experiences are misleading. Maybe I should try D on Windows and compare.

I don't want to start a flamewar or anything. That's not my point.

I use Win 8 Pro 64 bit and stable Debian on VirtualBox without big problems.

As far as installing/managing DMD itself on Linux, DVM will change your life.  Try the following:

wget -Odvm https://github.com/downloads/jacob-carlborg/dvm/dvm-0.4.1-linux-32
chmod +x dvm && ./dvm install dvm
 << open new terminal >>
dvm install 2.063.2
dvm use -d --64bit 2.063.2

Hello,

I'm the responsible of the Linux packages building process (http://dlang.org/download.html) and I'm absolutely disagree with you.

- Linux can compile to 64-bit since may 2011, Windows just now.
- Linux has 32-bit and 64-bit binaries since may 2011, Windows 32-bit only.
- Last dmd release includes "libphobos2.so" Linux shared library. Will see when "phobos.dll" will be available for Windows.

Regards,
-- 
Jordi Sayol

On Sunday, 16 June 2013 at 03:25:19 UTC, Dawid Ciężarkiewicz wrote:
> I am constantly hitting some Linux-related issues. Library incompatibilities, path incompatibilities.

From your post, this seems like the only concrete piece of evidence to support your claim. I have seen similar bug reports about these sorts of things in the past, but can you be more specific about the issues you are having? Perhaps they have been solved, or are easily solvable.

Also, please list any other issues you are having. It's important that D is solid on Linux.

Note, I'm on OSX so I'm not biased towards either Linux or Windows :-)