Hi guys,

I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.

Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.

I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on thoses questions.

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.
>
> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.
>
> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on thoses questions.

As far as I know, most of the people wait when D will be used by big companies for big projects. It's the chicken-egg problem. Personally, I found that D improves my productivity a lot (comparing to C++). I gave up on opinions of other people and use what is convenient for me in my own projects. But not everybody such "brave".

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.

D2 is under active development. Bugs get fixed, bottlenecks get optimized, and features get added or improved constantly.

These changes don't usually seem like a big deal from one release to the next, but they add up quickly. Compared to what we have now, D2 was (in my opinion) unfinished junk a few years ago. The quality has improved a lot since then, but it will take time for the bad taste left in many people's mouthes by the unstable, incomplete early builds to be forgotten.

This is a common problem for open source projects: the dev team is naturally more enthusiastic about the project than others, and also feels pressure to market it in order to attract testers, contributors, and donors. The result is that the product is declared "ready" before it really is by the standards of outsiders. People get fooled by the hype, try a half-baked build, and sour on the project.

As long as the dev team continues to solve D2's problems faster than they're adding new ones, I expect that adoption will continue to increase.

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.
>
> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.
>
> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on thoses questions.

I think it is because D has some fundamental problems. It is a risk to use software that is not proven to be safe, effective, and easy to use. The fact there are so many bugs(and many are big blockes) in D says something about D, it matters not how fast they are fixed.

It forces you in to a certain mold. All that power it has is attractive, but much of it is hot air if you can't get it off the ground in any serious professional way.  The larger the project one works on the more likely one will run in to bugs, the more complex the language is the slower it understand the problems, and the more limited tools one has, the slower it is.

So, D has many things going against it compared with well establish languages.  Because businesses care about the $$$, it matters what they use. D covers a lot more ground than almost any other compiler out their but it doesn't cover any of it will except in a few cases(the things that make it attractive). So, you can see D as a sort of dried up waste land desert with a few nice palm trees growing here and there and a few scorpions. C++, say, is a very lush forest with many tree dwelling monkeys. Which environment would you rather use? Sure, there is potential in the desert, it has nice hot sand, so if you like that, you'll be in paradise... also if you like palm trees(and most people in the D forum like palm trees... or scorpions, they can be a tasty treat every now and then).

Ok, maybe a bit exaggerated, but point is most people don't like the desert and D is like a desert, but not as extreme. To actually prove why would require about 158 MIT students, a 10M$ grant, and a time machine. Do you have any of that?

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 00:52:30 UTC, Gorge Jingale wrote:
>
> I think it is because D has some fundamental problems. It is a risk to use software that is not proven to be safe, effective, and easy to use. The fact there are so many bugs(and many are big blockes) in D says something about D, it matters not how fast they are fixed.


Which fundamental problems you refer to? I'm curious about thoses, I feel I just scratch the tip of the language so far.

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 00:52:30 UTC, Gorge Jingale wrote:
> So, you can see D as a sort of dried up waste land desert with a few nice palm trees growing here and there and a few scorpions. C++, say, is a very lush forest with many tree dwelling monkeys. Which environment would you rather use?

You're forgetting the spiked stick pits that the lush forest is full of, and also the monkeys are rabid. =)

On Tuesday, 26 July 2016 at 15:11:00 UTC, llaine wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm using D since a few month now and I was wondering why people don't jump onto it that much and why it isn't the "big thing" already.
>
> Everybody is into javascript nowadays, but IMO even for doing web I found Vibe.d more interesting and efficient than node.js for example.
>
> I agree that you have to be pragmatic and choose the right tools for the right jobs but I would be interested to have other opinion on those questions.

I've been testing D and love many features of the language. But I'm now to switching to Go for my alimentary project. But I prefer D's syntax, ranges and the easiness of generic coding.

The reason I'm switching to Go is because
1. there is a much larger community and code base (it's easier to find code snippet, help or programmers)
2. go routines (fibers integrated into the language, plug & play)
3. GC performance (no stop the world hiccups)
4. Web server && IO performance (see: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks or https://github.com/nanoant/WebFrameworkBenchmark).

As a computer scientist I prefer D to Go and see a lot of potential in it. But as a software developer I feel that D still needs maturation to be competitive in a production environment. I guess this is the reason why D doesn't get much traction yet.

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 09:28:49 UTC, chmike wrote:
> The reason I'm switching to Go is because
> 3. GC performance (no stop the world hiccups)

IIRC, there is a concurrent GC implementation used by sociomantic but it's linux only. (It uses fork() sys call)

> 4. Web server && IO performance (see: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks or https://github.com/nanoant/WebFrameworkBenchmark).

Please, these are terribly outdated benchmarks. There was a recent bug causing Vibe.D to not scale to multiple cores at all which has been fixed.

On Wednesday, 27 July 2016 at 09:28:49 UTC, chmike wrote:

> The reason I'm switching to Go is because
> 1. there is a much larger community and code base (it's easier to find code snippet, help or programmers)

I agree with you, but when I'm having trouble I always go to IRC and the guys there are always nice and help me a lot. (Don't know the GO community for that).

> 2. go routines (fibers integrated into the language, plug & play)
> 3. GC performance (no stop the world hiccups)
> 4. Web server && IO performance (see: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks or https://github.com/nanoant/WebFrameworkBenchmark).

On this point I strongly disagree with you.
In my company I've deployed a D app using Vibe.d for internal purposes.

The app is around 4000 loc, used in average by 30 people simultanously and is deployed on heroku free (512 MB RAM │ 1 web/1 worker) and the maximum response time is around 300ms.

Is way beyond every other app that we could have.

Look at this benchmark it's more up to date :
https://github.com/llaine/benchmarks


> As a computer scientist I prefer D to Go and see a lot of potential in it. But as a software developer I feel that D still needs maturation to be competitive in a production environment. I guess this is the reason why D doesn't get much traction yet.

Lack of production quality tools
Lack of good marketing
Lack of man power & corporate support
Lack of idiomatic D libraries

These are pretty much the core of all other negative consequences. Ex: GDC is few versions behind DMD because lack of man power.

If only we could break the vicious circle...