On 20 April 2012 18:09, SomeDude <lovelydear@mailmetrash.com> wrote:

On Friday, 20 April 2012 at 13:44:55 UTC, Manu wrote:

It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but I suspect there is interest :)

Maybe if Walter and Andrei were to define some sort of consortium like there is for Java, companies would be interested in participating in the development ? I have no idea how it would look like though, as that would mean a lot more organization and overhead. We clearly don't work like that right now.

How does that work in Java's case? It doesn't seem to me that there is the manpower here to do that.

If IBM for example was helping D like they did for eclipse, the traction

would be huge and the toolchain would stabilize so much faster. :(

What exactly would mainstream developers do to stimulate such traction, and
stabilise the toolchain as you are suggesting?

IBM has largely contributed to the development of the eclipse environment. In fact, it started as one of their products, Visual Age, that they open sourced, and this move was very successful.

Okay so you're talking about mega-companies who can afford to invest significant time and money into the language?

I think that's very unlikely to happen these days. But it would still be nice to be attractive to mid-large sized businesses to get their hands dirty.

The most significant factor here is to see these entities as customers, and not necessarily community participants or contributors. Is the community ready to have those sorts of users?

Their advertising potential may be valuable in bringing other interest and contributors into the community, but other than that, what can those entities bring to the community that isn't expressed in terms of manpower?