On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 12:58:16 UTC, Dukc wrote:

You're saying all this as if it's some kind of hidden truth and you're exsposing me or something, when it should be clear as day that I'm exaggerating. But I'm exaggerating to make a point, not to argue about definition of a "dead langauge". But if you really want to, the word "dead" has various meanings, including (but not limited to)[1]:

• having the appearance of death
• no longer producing or functioning
• lacking power or effect
• no longer having interest, relevance, or significance
• no longer in use
• commercially idle or unproductive
• certain to be doomed
• devoid of former occupants

When someone says "My phone's battery is dead", do you reply to them "you are exaggerating, it still has 1% left, it's only dead when it's 0%"?

You know, I have tried to reasonably argue. I even went through the hussle of personally counting up registered/updated libraries on DUB, and ever since (IIRC, I did the counting a long time ago) 2018 the amount of stuff being updated declined with every year. I mean, what would it take to confirm that D is dead or in a dying state? "Orgs using D" page being 75% filled with ones who ditched D is not enough? Dub statistics going down isn't enough?
Mike said something about "new contributors", but where are they?

As of now, the page lists 869 contributors. In Dec 2022 it was 834 [2]. In Dec 2021 it was 783[3]. So the amount of new contributors basically halved in a year. Where is the said growth?
In Dec 2020, the list had 716 entries [4], showing no growth in new contributors for the year 2021.
That is not to mention that the list only shows new contributors and doesn't account those who have left.

So, I will reiterate: what would it take you to admit that D is more dead than alive and that something must be done about it? If you will only admit deadness when literally nobody is using the lang anymore, isn't it a tad too late for you?

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dead
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20221207092606/https://dlang.org/foundation/contributors.html
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20211204222010/https://dlang.org/foundation/contributors.html
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20201125184925/https://dlang.org/foundation/contributors.html

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 12:58:16 UTC, Dukc wrote:

It's more than that though. There's a history of trolls coming on here to post rubbish any time someone makes a good post about the language. They wanted to be sure that if Google sent anyone here they'd only see negatives, which for the most part were made up. In this case, they're writing that the language is dead, and it means something when that's posted on the official website of the language.

If it were me, I'd just delete those posts and forget about defending the right to free expression. The folks that make these decisions don't agree with me that this vandalism does serious damage.

On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 15:48:02 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:

All the software my company (Kitsunebi Games) and my main project, Inochi2D, is written in D.

I am currently also speccing out a new UI toolkit for use in the Inochi2D project with a more modern look, working on a library to make DLang usable without a GC while still maintaining support for classes and such to make D libraries more usable outside of D, and such.

Inochi2D is also by extension bringing new blood in to the D community through people interested in contributing to the project, as well as people getting interested in D by extension of Inochi2D being written in D. And as it stands unless Walter does something really stupid with the language I do not intend switching away from D.

That being said I do sometimes feel like I need to maintain my own corner of the D ecosystem due to the lack of well maintained libraries, but hopefully the new blood joining through the Inochi2D community will help maintain all the libraries and apps I'm creating, heh.

Additionally, I now collaborate with the Dplug maintainers to make libraries more usable across the language ecosystem besides just Inochi2D.

One thing to hope is that the NLnet grant I applied for goes through, would mean I could work another year on Inochi2D and surrounding libraries instead of taking on contract work, thereby expanding the part of the D ecosystem made for desktop apps.

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 14:09:35 UTC, GrimMaple wrote:

D could show it is still alive by merging these two PRs before the new year:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15537

Note that this one was approved at the August 2023 DLF meeting, implemented shortly thereafter, yet still sitting in limbo.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15715

This is the culmination of about 6 years of work by the D community, yet is waiting on a pointless bit of red tape.

So many contributors have been driven away by similar situations. And it is going to happen again if they do not act within the next twelve days.

Additionally, I feel all these discussions about "D is dead, what should we do" is a waste of air. If you want D to be more active, contribute to the ecosystem, make PRs to projects so that we don't have so many one-man-operations going on. Not to mention an increase in financial support to D developers working on the ecosystem, such as WebFreak making code-d, dub developers, etc, would also increase activity within the D ecosystem.

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 14:28:15 UTC, Luna wrote:

"contribute to the ecosystem" is really unclear. What we can actually contribute, new libraries? Changes to language? If it's changes to language, then what we can add (or rework) to the language?

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 14:14:13 UTC, bachmeier wrote:

Just deleting posts because you don't like them is not a valid option. You can't see advantages and disadvantages of language without discussing about it. And of course one of current disadvantage of D is lack of libraries/good projects.

a post you don't agree with doesn't mean it's rubbish. Take that, others can have opinions too, and sometimes these opinions are negative.

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 14:57:00 UTC, Hors wrote:

New libraries, ports from other langs, bindings, tutorials, posts in social network about your projects, open source your projects (if possible), YouTube/Twitch videos/streams about the language, use the language on your job/hackathon/hobby project, create bug reports/issues, review DIPs, create/review PRs, PRs to Phobos/SDC/DMD/LDC/3rd party library that you know well and know how to improve, support abandoned libraries, become a maintainer of current projects (like Tilix is looking for maintainer), donate $ to D devs, improve documentation, etc

On Tuesday, 19 December 2023 at 14:27:15 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:

I'm sympathetic to your frustrations on the string interpolation DIP (I don't know anything about the other one you mention). However, even if there has been a lot of work on and off for a number of years, that specific PR has only been outstanding since the second half of October. Most DIPs take longer than 3 months to get approved and language changes in other languages don't typically move that fast either (which isn't to say that D shouldn't try to move faster than other languages). Hopefully Walter can review before year end, but it seems like an arbitrary deadline to demand it be merged by then or you will no longer contribute. No doubt that DIP will be an uphill battle with Walter.

But I wouldn't disagree that with someone saying that D can certainly be a frustrating experience sometimes.

For some mir packages (no idea if this is a problem more generally), code.dlang.org won't catch updated tags without a force update. No idea why. But I only have the ability to force update some of them, but not all, and not the one I need to continue with what I've been working on.

I'm also confused why we can't come to some kind of agreement on issue 23479 [1]. That played out back in February and has been crickets since then.

[1] https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23479