July 24, 2017
On Monday, 24 July 2017 at 13:34:18 UTC, Ali wrote:
> On Monday, 24 July 2017 at 12:47:43 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> On Monday, 24 July 2017 at 11:28:51 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>>> I had assumed D was designed to be a GC language from the outset.
>>
>> The D memory model is still in flux and always allowed C-like memory management. Whereas both Go and Java sacrificed fast C interfacing from the early days to get proper GC support, so there is a qualitative difference in the assumptions made in the language designs.
>>
>
>
> I am obviously not a language design or implementation expert, but what you said, does it mean that D cannot have a fast GC by design

http://www.infognition.com/blog/2014/the_real_problem_with_gc_in_d.html
July 24, 2017
On Monday, 24 July 2017 at 13:34:18 UTC, Ali wrote:
> I am obviously not a language design or implementation expert, but what you said, does it mean that D cannot have a fast GC by design

Many things are possible if you put enough constraints on the problem and enough advanced features in the tooling.

So I think that depends on how you write your programs, the hardware they run on as well as the effort it takes to get the compiler/runtime/tooling there.

When people say that a GC is fast they probably mean the performance you get when writing a variety of programs that allocate many objects with no thought given to how it affects memory management performance.

July 25, 2017
On Mon, 2017-07-24 at 12:47 +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars- d wrote:
> 
[…]
> Interestingly Dart is now moving towards static typing, as many of the current user Google users expect Java-like static predictability. So, one thing is what the language designers want, but maybe Google's own usage will take Go in another direction as well.

There is little traction in a browser-focused language that doesn't offer a massive USP over JavaScript/ECMAScript – typing is the only USP over ES6 that has any chance really. Elm, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. are already populating the market. I suspect Dart will have little hope for traction now.

-- 
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July 25, 2017
On Tuesday, 25 July 2017 at 10:27:43 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> There is little traction in a browser-focused language that doesn't offer a massive USP over JavaScript/ECMAScript – typing is the only USP over ES6 that has any chance really. Elm, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. are already populating the market. I suspect Dart will have little hope for traction now.

Well, most languages have little hope for traction :-). Traction comes predominantly from specific use cases, so it all depends on whether Google is going to push Dart as a cross platform programming language with flutter.io and how it is used internally at Google. I think they use it for their Google Ads software, so I guess it currently is quite important for them.

Anyhow, my point was more that Google's actual usage and needs might affect where Go 2 heads if we judge by Dart has evolved over time. I assume that the initial design of Go and Dart was more based on designe aesthetics, and that actual demand will drive the evolution if they are used extensively internally at Google...
July 26, 2017
On Tuesday, 25 July 2017 at 10:27:43 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> There is little traction in a browser-focused language that doesn't offer a massive USP over JavaScript/ECMAScript – typing is the only USP over ES6 that has any chance really. Elm, Kotlin, Ceylon, etc. are already populating the market. I suspect Dart will have little hope for traction now.

While Elm and Kotlin get a decent amount of press, Dart is scoring well on Github and TIOBE.
July 26, 2017
> When looking at other language ranking sites, D always scores better then Rust. Yet, Rust gets included in the ranking but D is ... nowhere to be seen.

Well, on the Tiobe index D is currently on place 23 way ahead of Lua, Scala, Rust, Kotlin, Groovy. So there is obviously asomething wrong with the Tiobe index here as all those other languagse are quite a bit in use. Hope this compensates a bit for your pain ;-).

> Not to be a downer but D really in my eyes is missing that "unique" feature that people care about, that allows people to blog about the language...

D is the most feature rich language I know of. Maybe only Scala comes close, but Scala can be at times an unreadable mess as the designers of the language valued mixing functional and OO higher than readability. D, on the contrary, has a very clean design througout.

But you are right. D is missing some unique selling point like ease of concurrency using Communicating Sequential Processes in Go or memory safety in Rust without a GC. This is because D does not have a business model, but seems to be seen as a playground for building the greatest language ever. I fear this will not change. Topics of people arguing that D needs a business case pop up regularly here and are every time mostly or also completely ignored. It does not look like this will change, because the main drivers of the language never drop a comment in those discussions.


July 26, 2017
On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 06:40:22 UTC, Bienlein wrote:
> D is the most feature rich language I know of. Maybe only Scala comes close, but Scala can be at times an unreadable mess as the designers of the language valued mixing functional and OO higher than readability. D, on the contrary, has a very clean design througout.
>
> But you are right. D is missing some unique selling point like ease of concurrency using Communicating Sequential Processes in Go or memory safety in Rust without a GC. This is because D does not have a business model, but seems to be seen as a playground for building the greatest language ever. I fear this will not change. Topics of people arguing that D needs a business case pop up regularly here and are every time mostly or also completely ignored. It does not look like this will change, because the main drivers of the language never drop a comment in those discussions.

I noticed the issues for me is going beyond just the language. Its also productivity.

Not going to hide that i switched to Pascal. There are some features that are needed in my case, where pascal has been kicking D's behind in my personal opinion.

One of those has been frankly community support. Lets say there is a issue in D and one posts about it here. If your lucky, in a few hours there is a response. Then the response can be categorized as:

* Friendly / Useful / Solve issue
* Useless off-topic responds that does not answer the question but focuses on a complaint and ignores the issue.
* Semi-aggressive answer that indeed solves the issue but one feels "intimidated"

I have for a long time have a love / hate relationship with D. And the negative feels have  always stemmed from the strange community.

Its not just the Pascal community where i feel better, even in the Rust / Go community people feel like the have more patience or are less judgmental.

Its this strange semi-aggressive that is her, that just feels so strange. I can not put my finger on it. All i can say is that i do not experience it in the same degree as with D.

Lets say i bring up the issue: Plugin/DLL linking is a bore and needs to be more easy. Go made it easier with simply "-buildmode=plugin". In Pascal it only takes one keyword "library"... I can bring up a lot of topics like this where things are more easy in other languages and in D it requires at times hours to get something going but lets use this example.

You will get people that agree but then at the same time point out:

* Stop complaining about it, we do not have the people to add this.
* Why don't you code it into the D source.
* Agree but it will never happen.
* We do not need this.
* Why do you not pay for this feature.

And every topic with a complained or suggestion comes down to this.

They recently added Static foreach ... yay ... and i do not care a god daim thing because it only adds more C++ upper language focus but does not make the language or the platform more easy. And boy are people going to be annoyed for me writing this. But how about NOT always adding new feature and actually making things more easy for new people.

The issue of D is not the pure language but this strange over focus on being the next C++ replacement that nobody is asking for! There are already a lot of other languages that can do C++ things, namely C++!

You want no memory management, you go Rust, Pascal, ... Easy web development, Go, Crystal, hell Ruby, PHP. System development: C, C++, Rust...

D is trying to win over a market with a mix of language feature that make it a master of none. And that shows...

There are just too much things where D is lacking but people there is simply a lack of flow.

Can not do X because of lack of money, people.
Can not get more money because we lack X and people.
Can not get more people because we lack X and money.

And the circle keep going while attention is put on language feature when the language is already great but the whole sea of other issues outside the language get a minimal of attention....

I will not wast too much time on this because i can write on a piece of paper and know what the exact responses will be.

And the end result became, i gave up on D. Switch to the freaking old Pascal language and got more stuff done in a few days time, then the semi-months with D. How strange it may sound. And hell, trust me, Pascal there documentation sucks in its 1980s style but still its so much more easy to connect the dots. People know my opinion on the current D doc system :)  So its not just about modern styling and examples...
July 26, 2017
On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 15:55:14 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> The issue of D is not the pure language but this strange over focus on being the next C++ replacement that nobody is asking for! There are already a lot of other languages that can do C++ things, namely C++!

Once upon a time D claimed to be a cleaned up and more convenient C++ style language, but I don't think it moved in that direction after the onset. So I don't view it as a C++ replacement, but more like an enthusiast language that more people toy with than use in production. If D actually moved to take on C++ then that would be sensible strategy, but at this point there is just too much baggage and C++ is now much more of a moving target than it was 10 years ago. So, D cannot assume that goal, as C++ is moving faster than D at the moment...

> There are just too much things where D is lacking but people there is simply a lack of flow.

Well, you have to match ambitions to the resources. I think Go made the right decision there, to scale the language to something they could get to relatively stable in a reasonable amount of time, then work on the runtime. Not sexy, but useful.

> And the end result became, i gave up on D. Switch to the freaking old Pascal language and got more stuff done in a few days time, then the semi-months with D. How strange it may sound.

Why Pascal, and not one of the more contemporary languages?

July 26, 2017
On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 15:55:14 UTC, Wulfklaue wrote:
> But how about NOT always adding new feature and actually making things more easy for new people.

People need to eventually understand that all the energy wasted for complaining about D/the community/whatever would be so much more valuable if put into contributions. I'm tired of these negative vibes, 'somebody else gotta do this in his/her spare time, I need it so bad!' paradigm.

You for example reported a potential LDC issue you encountered (Visual Studio 2017 not autodetected), thanks for taking that time, but when I asked you to dig into it, you didn't even reply: https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2134. That's not the way issues are fixed and D can move forward, and neither is endlessly complaining about the (perceived) status quo.

[I ignored this thread for now but was curious why it's still active, so I only read the last 2 posts.]
July 26, 2017
On Wednesday, 26 July 2017 at 18:58:31 UTC, kinke wrote:
> People need to eventually understand that all the energy wasted for complaining about D/the community/whatever would be so much more valuable if put into contributions.

Value is relative. So, if you don't use a tool in production why would you derive more value value from "improving" on the tool rather than analysing it to figure out why/why-not/how/how-not etc? Gaining insight might actually be more valuable…