On Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 17:53:27 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> It all depends on how you define "successful". If you define success as having a huge user community, then your paragraph above applies. I would argue that there are alternative ways to measure success. Is Scheme a success? OpenBSD? JS Bach? I say emphatically "yes" (especially regarding Bach) and yet all of them have user communities orders of magnitude smaller than their most popular competitors.
In this context, my definition of "successful" is a language that you can put your trust in.
Like in this thread, just as an example:
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/qwrguthjwvawnjtpzcbf@forum.dlang.org
This is about the question if using D for a major commercial project is a solid business decision.
I am not so sure, to be honest.
And please be assured that I'm not trying to trash-talk here, I just call it as I see it, as a newcomer to the language.
D has some awesome aspects to it, that's why I started looking into it for personal projects. I appreciate that there are some good books, I got the ones by Ali Cehreli, Mike Parker, and Adam Ruppe, plus the one by Kai Nacke on vibe.d. So there's good learning material.
But on the other hand, a lot of people seem to have walked away from the language over the years, like Andrei Alexandrescu. Fine, people walk away from projects all the time, doesn't have to mean anything. But then, looking at the forums, there seems to be a lot of dissent and even a recent fork.
When I tried to get help with my vibe.d project, I didn't get much feedback in this forum and the "official" vibe.d forum at https://forum.rejectedsoftware.com/ seems abandoned entirely. What's that all about? What happened to Sönke Ludwig, did he walk away, too? What does that mean for the future of vibe.d?
Has any large project ever been built with vibe.d? Apparently not: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/mjewutfvitpnlovbwofu@forum.dlang.org
I'm using VS Code as my IDE, mostly because I can use it under Windows and Linux alike. I quite like its good D support provided by the code-d plugin.
Problem is, though, that it hasn't been updated for two years: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=webfreak.code-d
I asked about that here (https://forum.dlang.org/thread/gwulbuatekebrtrdmyhi@forum.dlang.org) and got no answer. What's up with WebFreak001, is he gone, too? I just don't know.
I will continue with my D/vibe.d project because it is just a fun experiment that I do in my free time. If I get stuck at some point, fine, it still will have been a great learning experience.
But would I stick with D if my business depended on it? Hell no. I'd probably use Go or maybe even C++ with wt or something like that. Something that I can be reasonably sure will still be maintained in 5 years from now.
Maybe I will be able to complete my project successfully. But as to the D language as a whole, it does not feel like a success story to me.
Please feel free to correct me on any and all points that I got wrong (I'm sure there are many) - again, I have been describing my totally subjective impressions, with no intention to offend anyone.