Am 08.02.2014 19:09, schrieb "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang@gmail.com>":
> On Saturday, 8 February 2014 at 17:08:44 UTC, Daniel Murphy wrote:
>  ...
>
> I think D could steal the VM/OS/embedded space with a very focused
> effort. C/C++ is ahead, but I believe D can surpass that if you go
> beyond C/C++ and forget about pleasing the Java/C# crowd.

Speaking from my Java/C# experience, D has a big up-hill battle against
those ecosystems:

- Tooling is great, we love our IDEs and just imagine having something like VisualVM to track down unwanted memory allocations and other contention points

- Compilation to native code is also available, if one wishes to do so.

- There are lots of embedded VM for both ecosystems capable to run in boards as small as a SIM card

- High performance trading systems with low latency are moving away from
C++ systems to JVM/.NET ones. Quite common in city, in London, for example.

- The going native wave, has made both JVM guys think about including AOT as part of the standard JDK, add value types, make unsafe package official as part of the post Java 8 features. Whereas the .NET camp has a new JIT (RyuJIT) in the works, and a switch to full native deployment is being worked on (ProjectN). Triggered mostly by what seems to be the C++/CX failure.

I wish D also finds its place in the mainstream, it is a hard fight nonetheless.

--
Paulo

On Saturday, 8 February 2014 at 18:41:34 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Speaking from my Java/C# experience, D has a big up-hill battle against
> those ecosystems:
>
> - Tooling is great, we love our IDEs and just imagine having something like VisualVM to track down unwanted memory allocations and other contention points
>
> - Compilation to native code is also available, if one wishes to do so.


I am sure you are right, and they are probably the better alternative if you have the economic margins and if stability is critical.

The space I am thinking about is more that of scalable "artsy worlds", "freemium games" and "simple custom webservices/caches for mobile apps". It is important to keep costs down, both development and running cost because of the margins, so it should boot fast for scalability (and reboot after failure), easy to adapt and use memory well (for memcaching etc). The basic idea is to rent cheap cheap VMs close to the customers (in different countries) and be able to boot up more servers with little administration.

I think C++ only works out if the design is ready before you code, and redesigning is painful. I fear Java and C# is a bit heavy in terms of memory and booting to run on cheap servers that should boot up fast. So I feel D and Go are currently the most promising alternatives, though I feel Go might be a bit difficult to work with and D is not quite there either. Maybe Rust will be ready in a year or two…

> - High performance trading systems with low latency are moving away from
> C++ systems to JVM/.NET ones. Quite common in city, in London, for example.

Yeah, they have the economic margins to purchase dedicated servers.

> - The going native wave, has made both JVM guys think about including AOT as part of the standard JDK, add value types, make unsafe package official as part of the post Java 8 features. Whereas the .NET camp has a new JIT (RyuJIT) in the works, and a switch to full native deployment is being worked on (ProjectN). Triggered mostly by what seems to be the C++/CX failure.
>
> I wish D also finds its place in the mainstream, it is a hard fight nonetheless.

It is, and I think you are quite right about the infrastructure part. On the client side I moved from Javascript to Dart and I think the productivity increased by a factor of 2 or something even though Dart compiles down to Javascript and has its own problems... But the IDE/library support really helps a lot.

But actually, I don't think D needs to find its place in the mainstream. I think it needs to be the best option in its niche. And I think light weight, snappy servers that boot/reset in an instant is a niche it can grab.