On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 21:48:35 UTC, Bioinfornatics wrote:
>- Promote some killer libraries (Gsoc is a good way to see those libraries as it is cuurently done). But they need to survive to this events, be maintained or added to the the std library.
What is the state of d dataframe? Mir ? D ai ? D web framework back and front included through wasm ?
To me, the community have to create those libraries instead to complain in order to transform an application language to a system language.
My suspicion is that if we want inroads to scientific computing, D needs to create packages that provide seamless utility with current solutions. People are not going to learn D just to use yet another AI, dataframe, or linear algebra library or framework.
If an analyst is working in R or Python, you have to go to them, meaning that at first you speak their language. So a high quality alternative to a current tool that does something their's does not, perhaps it performs better or is easier to use and so forth with a backend in D.
In terms of getting "enthusiast" programmers to write D code, you'll need to persuade someone using Rcpp/cpp11 or even the new extendr (for Rust) that they are better off writing D code using something like embedr or whatever. This is where people will need to be persuaded why they should switch to D. Things like:
- Performance - super-important in scientific computing. Can D stand up to C++ in those terms? Easy and well documented access to popular HPC frameworks.
- Memory safety - if they already have Rust why should they use D? How memory safe is D?
- Ecosystem - what does D's language ecosystem have to offer? This one is not a deal breaker but is still very important.
- What's so special about D and why should they use it?
If this was 5-6 years ago, I'd have said that the barrier was much easier to penetrate, but now things have become much more competitive, and there are fewer low-hanging fruit. There are still opportunities out there but efforts need to be properly focused. I suspect it needs to be an ongoing affair rather than a summer project. It's not necessarily about expending a huge amount of resource, just finding the right focus to wedge the door open and then progressively capitalising.