June 06, 2016
There's definitely an information war that needs to be won. That D has been around for 15-odd years and is still considered an emerging language is something of a problem.

I linked my DConf talks on a games industry forum, and the first response was that "It looks like a poor man's Rust". A notion I quickly dispelled, but it's a mindset that needs solid, linkable examples to work against. The talk I'm hoping to hold at GDC Europe in August will have some examples to that effect (they still haven't got back to me with confirmation). I'll need to make that more visible than slides/video once the talk is done.

Echoing the need for decimal support. I won't use it myself, but I know it's critical for finance.
June 06, 2016
On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:17:40 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:30:55 UTC, Pie? wrote:
>> Duh! The claim is made that D can work without the GC... but that's a red herring... If you take about the GC what do you have?
>
> Like 90% of the language, still generally nicer than most the competition.
>
> Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to Reddit pressure. GC is a proven success in the real world with a long and impressive track record. Yes, there are times when you need to optimize your code, but even then you aren't really worse off with it than without it.

The problem is that D is targeted as a multi-paradigm systems programming language, and while it's largely successful at that, the GC doesn't fit in with that domain by nature of its existence.

There's no problem with _having_ a GC, it just shouldn't be the default case for what's meant to be a systems language, especially when language and standard library features become dependent upon it.

But I digress: we've had this debate before, we're having it now, and we'll keep having it well into the future :-)
June 06, 2016
On 6/6/16 6:17 AM, Andre Pany wrote:
> to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
> in my opinion D lacks std.decimal.

Do C, C++, Java, Go, or Rust have a standard decimal type? -- Andrei
June 06, 2016
On 6/6/16 6:17 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to Reddit
> pressure.

Writing GC's issues off as pressure from reddit would be an understatement. -- Andrei

June 06, 2016
On 6/6/16 6:38 AM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
> On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:17:40 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to
>> Reddit pressure. GC is a proven success in the real world with a long
>> and impressive track record. Yes, there are times when you need to
>> optimize your code, but even then you aren't really worse off with it
>> than without it.
>
> While I understand that some people can't afford a GC, this has confused
> me as well.
>
> I never understood the large amount of people on /r/programming
> complaining about the GC when the vast majority of software is written
> in one of the following languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript.

These are only a part of our competition. -- Andrei

June 06, 2016
On 06/06/2016 6:29 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 6/6/16 6:17 AM, Andre Pany wrote:
>> to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
>> in my opinion D lacks std.decimal.
>
> Do C, C++, Java, Go, or Rust have a standard decimal type? -- Andrei

C/C++: not really
Java: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/i18n/format/numberintro.html
Go: Two proposals as of last year https://forum.golangbridge.org/t/what-is-the-proper-golang-equivalent-to-decimal-when-dealing-with-money/413/8
Rust: nope
PHP: Has stuff, but we REALLY don't want to go around copying them

So where is it used? PHP, Java and C# the most. What are the languages used in making e-commerce stuff? Them.
June 06, 2016
On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> * The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right off.

Please, elliminate GC.
This also hurts the open source community. Why would I write/opensource a high performance library if I know that projects like AAA games are not going to use it anyway due to GC in D? On the other hand if I can write a library that guarantees to not use and not need garbage collector then even C and C++ projects can use it.
With GC, D doesn't play nice with existing C/C++ code.

> * Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.

Quality is an issue, but I thing a bigger problem for adoption is just the time it takes a new user to set the dev environment up. If you look at those pages:
https://wiki.dlang.org/Editors
https://wiki.dlang.org/IDEs
most of the tools use dcd, dscanner and dfmt to provide the most important features like auto-completion, autoformatting etc.
The problem is that dcd, dscanner and dfmt are not bundled together so it takes a long time to actually install all this together. Note that discovering what is what also takes a lot of time for a new user.
I tried to do this recently and it took me 2 days before I found a combination of versions of dcd, dscanner, dfmt, dub and an IDE that work together correctly on Windows. My example is probably extreme but is a lesson.

May I suggest bundling the official tools with dcd, dscanner, dfmt and dub to create a Dlang-SDK.

Then the user would only have to install
- Dlang-SDK
- An editor
And everything would work. This would reduce the time from a few hours (with a very large variance) to 30 minutes. Then maybe people who try D in their free time without being strongly indoctrinated by Andrei will not quit after 30 minutes. :)
June 05, 2016
On 6/5/2016 11:38 PM, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 06/06/2016 6:29 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 6/6/16 6:17 AM, Andre Pany wrote:
>>> to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
>>> in my opinion D lacks std.decimal.

> Java: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/i18n/format/numberintro.html

That's about formatting numbers, not about a decimal type.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html

is more like it.

June 06, 2016
On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 06:29:27 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 6/6/16 6:17 AM, Andre Pany wrote:
>> to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
>> in my opinion D lacks std.decimal.
>
> Do C, C++, Java, Go, or Rust have a standard decimal type? -- Andrei

With java 7 there is the big decimal library in java:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/math/BigDecimal.html

Kind regards
André


June 06, 2016
On 6/5/2016 11:38 PM, rikki cattermole wrote:
> On 06/06/2016 6:29 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 6/6/16 6:17 AM, Andre Pany wrote:
>>> to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
>>> in my opinion D lacks std.decimal.
>>
>> Do C, C++, Java, Go, or Rust have a standard decimal type? -- Andrei

Apparently there's a spec: http://speleotrove.com/decimal/decarith.html