On Friday, 26 July 2019 at 03:29:33 UTC, vladislavp wrote:
>
> The number of negativism in some posts is very high.
> To the point where it is actually hard to understand the technical details behind
> particular grievances.
>

It is because it is a forum (and a particularly accessible ones).

In audio software we too have internet PHP forums which at first sight seem important, many opinions in there, many debates...

At the end of the day the LARGE majority of customers are not there. It's not even representative, since so much of the audience of internet forums is skewed towards "people that like to talk on the internet" and yes, they will tend to be unhappy and critical.

If you have 7000 message on an internet forums, probably what you are doing in your life is "writing on this forum", not doing anything else.

And the more people realize that internet forums are sweked, the more they also realize the opinion of internet forums - comically - almost do not matter, it's almost always a reaction towards some underlying event.

Do not mistake these forums with the D community at large... D has excellent reputation in the trenches. These forums are certainly not representative, with so many people purposedly trying to discourage contributors, who don't use D and/or never had this intention.

On Monday, 29 July 2019 at 13:04:52 UTC, lempiji wrote:
> By the way, D-man (and Gopher) are very popular in Japan.
>
> https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq45DGfFLg-/

Haha I want a pan like that! Marvellous. We should serve those at next DConf.

Bastiaan.

On Monday, 29 July 2019 at 13:56:49 UTC, Chris wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 July 2019 at 21:23:20 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
>> Sounds more like they are playing a game of internal politics.
>>  If demand for a feature increases it is more likely to land in tooling...
>
> That's how I read it too.
>
> I just wonder, if this will really work in the real world:
>
> 'According to an internal survey, the top reason for adoption was “correctness” – an extension of Rust’s safety guarantees that work towards making true the adage “if it compiles, then it works”.' [1]
>
> After all, it's MS ;)

Hm, yes... no, it won't work throughout the organization, but they do have a focus on "correctness" at Microsoft research, so I guess they have some kind of long term vision for where they want to go. Or maybe not. Who knows. Anyway, Rust does not bring "correctness", so that quote only makes it sound more political to me...

On Friday, 26 July 2019 at 03:29:33 UTC, vladislavp wrote:
> The number of negativism in some posts is very high.
> To the point where it is actually hard to understand the technical details behind
> particular grievances.

I think the issue is that many flaws of D are not strictly technical. For old languages like C/C++ the idea was that language is king, makefiles are the ultimate build tool and IDE support means vim syntax highlighting plugin. Those times have changed. The ecosystem around the language, in form of available packages, frameworks, boilerplate projects, IDE plugins is just as important, if not even more important as the language itself. Just look at Go. It's such an uninspired language with hardly any notable features other than goroutines, and yet it's popular because it's easy to get started with, easy to find ready packages to use for various tasks, fast to compile and easy to deploy. All while maintaining good performance, as most native languages do.

The vision document has not been posted in a while, and most of the progress comes in form of bugfixes, memory safety related DIPs or extern(C++) related changes. But overall, I feel like many people believe that D is wasting it's potential. Now, normally, it wouldn't be an issue, and D would move forward at its pace as it always did. However, Rust happened, and people see how quickly it exploded in popularity. I guess people like to downplay popularity of Rust here, but for many new projects Rust is just the new default, if you don't need compatibility with legacy code. It's still not a language I'd call mainstream, but I believe in several years the question asked will be "why are we doing it in C++? can't we just do it in Rust?".

>
> As for Microsoft, It would be interesting to hear how they view
>  D's BetterC and its, hopefully soon, upcoming DIP 1000
> for their Driver Verification (SLAM)
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/slam/
> And building devices drivers in BetterC (since it specifically allows to use C's or C++ runtime).

Oh. That one is simple to answer. I'm not Microsoft, but the answer will be along the lines of: "Our engineers are not familiar with the D language. While it has some interesting ideas, we really enjoy the opt-out safety features of Rust and the compile time checks provided by the borrow checker. Combined with a powerful toolchain and a very active community, it seems to be the future of native GC-less programming. Also, -betterC mode seems to be barely documented and it's hard to say what the future of it will be".