Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its own thread. It's very important.
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I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies. Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:

* The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right off.

* Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.

* Safety has holes and bugs.

* Hiring people who know D is a problem.

* Documentation and tutorials are weak.

* There's no web services framework (by this time many folks know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough interest.

* (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio plugin, it doesn't exist.

* Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.

* Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the weaknesses above.

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its own thread. It's very important.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies. Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:
>

and it's taken you that long to now that the following are the problem? (No offense... just seems like the following list is obvious whether 1 or 1 googol)

> * The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right off.
>

Duh! The claim is made that D can work without the GC... but that's a red herring... If you take about the GC what do you have? A ton of effort to build something that gets D to work properly without the GC. It can be done but it isn't done except by leet guru's who have the time and knowledge to do it. It is not a built in option that works out of the box.


> * Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.
>

Duh! Every use Visual studio? Sure Visual D offers a glimpse of hope, but only glimpse. D has some cool stuff but that's all it is for most users in my guestimation.

> * Safety has holes and bugs.
>
> * Hiring people who know D is a problem.
>
> * Documentation and tutorials are weak.
>
> * There's no web services framework (by this time many folks know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough interest.
>
> * (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio plugin, it doesn't exist.
>
> * Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
>
> * Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the weaknesses above.

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Andrei posted this on another thread. I felt it deserved its own thread. It's very important.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I go to conferences. Train and consult at large companies. Dozens every year, cumulatively thousands of people. I talk about D and ask people what it would take for them to use the language. Invariably I hear a surprisingly small number of reasons:
>
> * The garbage collector eliminates probably 60% of potential users right off.
>
> * Tooling is immature and of poorer quality compared to the competition.
>
> * Safety has holes and bugs.
>
> * Hiring people who know D is a problem.
>
> * Documentation and tutorials are weak.
>
> * There's no web services framework (by this time many folks know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough interest.
>
> * (On Windows) if it doesn't have a compelling Visual Studio plugin, it doesn't exist.
>
> * Let's wait for the "herd effect" (corporate support) to start.
>
> * Not enough advantages over the competition to make up for the weaknesses above.

Hi,

to be usable for companies which want to create economic software,
in my opinion D lacks std.decimal. Maybe some companies will develop their
own decimal libraries but for the others they won't.
There is some great work, but currently it seems to be blocked by std.bigint
https://github.com/andersonpd/eris/issues/6

For the tooling I can only speak for windows environment. To have a sophisticated
IDE, the DLL topic needs some love. DLL are a major topic on windows and without
sophisticated DLL support, it is hardly possible to build an integrated IDE similar
to the well known like Visual Studio/Delphi/...
One major issue I faced, I create a class in a DLL and cannot cast the class
in my main application to another type due to the missing type info.
The workaround would be to have massive code duplication, which makes the code more complex.
Also here some great work are already done but blocked by the "export semantic" topic.

Kind regards
André

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:30:55 UTC, Pie? wrote:
> Duh! The claim is made that D can work without the GC... but that's a red herring... If you take about the GC what do you have?

Like 90% of the language, still generally nicer than most the competition.

Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to Reddit pressure. GC is a proven success in the real world with a long and impressive track record. Yes, there are times when you need to optimize your code, but even then you aren't really worse off with it than without it.

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:20:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> * Documentation and tutorials are weak.

I never understood this, as I've always found D's docs to be pretty average. Let's compare a typical Phobos page with a page from the Python docs:

Python Section on String Methods: https://docs.python.org/2.7/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods
std.string: http://dlang.org/phobos/std_string.html

Which is more helpful? Yet people still use Python despite it.

> * There's no web services framework (by this time many folks know of D, but of those a shockingly small fraction has even heard of vibe.d). I have strongly argued with Sönke to bundle vibe.d with dmd over one year ago, and also in this forum. There wasn't enough interest.

"Web Services", like "cloud", is a fancy marketing term that hides the simplicity of the concept in order to sound cool in board rooms. It just means "a web server that doesn't just serve web pages".

I'm going to sound cold here, but how much can we accommodate people who don't do their research? Literally do this http://lmgtfy.com/?q=d+web+server. If they can't be bothered to do the google search, then I suspect they're one of the people who Walter talks about: always finding an excuse not to use something. Vibe.d was one of the things that first drew me to D because I was interested in it's feature set after I took ten seconds and googled for "D web server".

Maybe the best solution here would be a "recommended packages" page that's linked from the home page under the "Packages" section. But I foresee that as being seen like we're playing favorites by some in the D community.

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:17:40 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to Reddit pressure. GC is a proven success in the real world with a long and impressive track record. Yes, there are times when you need to optimize your code, but even then you aren't really worse off with it than without it.

While I understand that some people can't afford a GC, this has confused me as well.

I never understood the large amount of people on /r/programming complaining about the GC when the vast majority of software is written in one of the following languages: C#, Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript. Those have to cover at least 80% of all software projects in the US and not only do they have a GC, they force you to use a GC. This just shows to me that /r/programming is not a representative sample of programmers at all.

The anti D's GC thing has become meme at this point. I have literally seen only one person on /r/programming complain about Go's GC, despite Go being a slower language overall.

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:17:40 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:30:55 UTC, Pie? wrote:
>> Duh! The claim is made that D can work without the GC... but that's a red herring... If you take about the GC what do you have?
>
> Like 90% of the language, still generally nicer than most the competition.
>
> Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to Reddit pressure. GC is a proven success in the real world with a long and impressive track record. Yes, there are times when you need to optimize your code, but even then you aren't really worse off with it than without it.

GC is okay if there is a way to ensure it does not suspend time critical code.  Right now this is not possible.  Even if my time critical code is completely @nogc, other threads still can trigger  the GC and stop the world including my time critical thread.

A lot of people need GUI

As second part db drivers and orm.

I am one of thouse who prefer to work with languages that have GC

Yeah, docs should have more examples. Sometimes it very hard to unserstand how to use function without examples

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:47:20 UTC, finalpatch wrote:
> On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 04:17:40 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 02:30:55 UTC, Pie? wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Like 90% of the language, still generally nicer than most the competition.
>>
>> Though, I wish D would just own its decision instead of bowing to Reddit pressure. GC is a proven success in the real world with a long and impressive track record. Yes, there are times when you need to optimize your code, but even then you aren't really worse off with it than without it.
>
> GC is okay if there is a way to ensure it does not suspend time critical code.  Right now this is not possible.  Even if my time critical code is completely @nogc, other threads still can trigger  the GC and stop the world including my time critical thread.

You can still unregister your critical thread from GC.

On Monday, 6 June 2016 at 05:13:11 UTC, Daniel Kozak wrote:
> You can still unregister your critical thread from GC.

exactly. that's what i did in my sound engine, and it works like a charm: i can enjoy hiccup-less ogg replaying on the background while the main code enjoys GC.