On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 10:48:59 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

I'm 97.7331% sure we don't need more of anything, just actual people writing things.

Just do it 💗

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 10:52:35 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

If you want D to trend as you stated, then you most certainly need to fix things like alias not working properly and other "bugs", make language features work without GC, add a solid competitive memory management solution that isn't the current GC. You probably also need to clean up syntax and add things that people take for granted from modern languages such convenient tuple syntax and similar features that are now becoming mainstream in other languages that also try to compete with C++.

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 11:10:27 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

I'm 2.2669% sure that would make D trend

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 12:08:46 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

That's the bare minimum for an alternative system level language in 2022+.

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 12:49:01 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

So, with all this knowledge we have now.

How do we move forward?

Maybe even more important: WHO will move forward?

I'm not trying to create friction, but I get the sense that not everyone complaining wants to contribute to solving the problem they are complaining about.

D is a community project after all. If we want it to thrive we must all contribute, even just a little.

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 13:08:30 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

It is a matter of process and leadership. If you really care about this then the best option is to create a comprehensive design document where you go through everything that has to be "fixed" to get to a competitive position and adjust it to Walter's vision for the language, get him on board and then take it to the D foundation.

You need to have a plan and fix the process before you try to fix other things. If you don't have a plan and don't have a process that backs up that plan then you just get to fix inconveniences (which I am sure people who already has adopted the language appreciate) but you don't get to position yourself in the market.

Asking people to do "something" or "more" without a realistic plan and a process does not make much sense to me.

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 13:23:53 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

If you (or anyone else) would like to propose improvements to D's process, you can email Mike Parker and request an opportunity to discuss them at one of the D foundation's monthly meetings.

You may also wish to join forces with Mathias Lang, the author of the governance proposal discussed by the D foundation last year. [1]

[1] https://forum.dlang.org/post/rdqskizblbcdtahlxxsm@forum.dlang.org

On Friday, 28 October 2022 at 09:51:04 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

It's far from bad but far from perfect :)

My own personal annoyances with D are:

• Subpar support for @nogc code. I don't quite know why but I've really taken a liking to writing in @nogc, and I'm very very slowly writing my own library to handle some things, but it's kinda sad we don't even have @nogc containers in Phobos.

I'm not a GC hater btw, and I like how simple it can be to reason about D's GC.

• Poor ecosystem. I know we can tap into the vast landscape of C, but I'd rather a nice native D API instead (or D wrapper). Strangely, I don't really feel any real motivation now to share my code, especially on dub, so I mostly just write things for myself to use.

I want to improve things myself, and I've had some fun ideas in mind, but time; effort, and increasing disinterest in the language outside my own little bubble, is kinda stopping that.

• The 'fashion' of stuffing things into library solutions instead of adding it into the language. I love what we can achieve in D via its native prowess for metaprogramming, but it kinda falls flat on its face at times.

For example, with pattern matching for SumType, having an error in your match handlers can be very... interesting to debug; likely has much more impact on compile times than a native language solution, and I've been meaning to measure what the name mangling for symbols that end up in the resulting binary is like for more extensive usage of sum types.

One of the things I love about C# is all the syntax sugar - it makes code feel more expressive to me.

• The impossible situation we're cornered into when it comes to discussing adding things directly into the language: Should it be @gc? @nogc? both? exceptions? support the newer safety fetures? how can we shoe horn it into a library instead? etc. etc.

String interpolation is my favourite example of this.

• A general lack of vision. Honestly I don't really know what D wants to be or achieve, and I find it hard for my personal usages at the moment due to things like a lack of a solid AWS SDK. It's a language for everyone and everything yet also no one and nothing at the same time.

• Tooling not being terribly great compared to other languages.

Still though, there's no other language I love using more than this one, even if I personally can't see much of a future for it anymore :)

idk, it's weird because in some ways I've kinda given up hope with D, but I still want to use it because nothing else I've tried really compares in terms of expressiveness and metaprogramming. I have to use Go a lot for work, and even with generics I'm just begging for even simple templating that D has instead of generics ;-;

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 13:38:13 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:

There has been a lot of changes about all the management behind dlang development (e.g., the high-level vision document(s); the monthly board meetings; the reporting of those; making the hardware infrastructure more robust and less dependent on individuals; etc). I would call this a positive change, and certainly aligned with the many calls for better management, and would think the movement is right.

On Tuesday, 1 November 2022 at 13:54:03 UTC, M.M. wrote:

I think so too. Things are on the right track. We just need more time.