On 09/04/2019 01:07, Mike Franklin via Digitalmars-d wrote:
IMO, Rust's only feature is the borrow checker; the
rest of the language stinks. But, statically-checked memory
safety is so fantastic Rust is destined for success. If D had an
equally effective mechanism for memory safety and fearless
concurrency, there would be no reason for Rust to exist, and there
would be no competition for D.
It seems to me that Rust's real killer feature is that it is backed
by Mozilla. How many major modern languages are really successful
without major corporate backing? C# has Microsoft, Java had Sun/has
Oracle[1], Javascript had Netscape (when Netscape mattered) as well
as browser support from Microsoft (when that mattered), Go has
Google, Swift has Apple. In comparison, D does not have big name
backing (sorry, no offence intended!).
(I should add that I think that C and C++ are exceptions to this
since they have, in comparison, been around for much longer and were
able to get up a head of steam in their own standards-driven right
before corporate backing came to matter in the same way that it
seems to now).
And so even if D had the same (or better) features than Rust or Go,
it would still face competitors.
Thus it seems to me that technical improvements such as adding
features to D to improve its concurrency and memory safety are
certainly important, as I understand it, but *marketing* is
important too. Is it possible that some major project with the
profile of Firefox could be (partly) moved to D from C++?
( A bit about me: This is my first post here and I am not currently
a D programmer. I joined this mail list to learn a bit more about D.
I am currently working on a cross platform thick client application
project in C# (yes, thick client app projects still exist). It is
possible that future versions of this project could be written in
one of Rust, D or Go, depending on how each language develops
including issues like readability, wasm support, asynch/concurrency
support, and cross platform GUI support ).
Footnote:-
1: Luckily for Java, it had already built up a head of steam in its
own right before Oracle came along.
--
Mark Rousell