On Saturday, 23 December 2023 at 20:17:29 UTC, Don Allen wrote:
> the fact is that without him, this project wouldn't exist.
In the spirit of Christmas, let's spread holiday cheer and give thanks to the many people who made D what it is today.
Walter Bright, of course, wrote the first draft of the language and compiler, and lends his public credibility to the project. But, he is far from alone in making the project exist.
Without Andrei Alexandrescu, D certainly wouldn't look anything like it does now. Being the primary author of Phobos as it exists today (Phobos before Andrei was essentially recycled Javascript 3 support modules and some thinly wrapped C bindings), Andrei has quite possibly had the greatest single influence on the timbre of D code.
Additionally, Andrei is the one primarily responsible for organizing the D Language Foundation and the various D scholarship programs that drive much of the internal development.
He also lent his pen to D, writing the book titled "The D Programming Language", laying out both a resource for learning D and a vision for its future, in a remarkably readable format.
I'm sure if I actually thought about this, the list could go on.
Don Clugston did significant work on D's math support and is notable for being the one who created CTFE.
Bill Baxter, Matthew Wilson, and a few others are influential in creating much of D metaprogramming as we know it today, including innovations such as static if and mixin template.
Timon Gehr, Jonathan Marler, Daniel Murphy, Kenji Hara, Sebastian Wilzbach, Mike Franklin, Benjamin Thaut, Michel Fortin, Jacob Carlborg, David Gileadi, and so many more have all left significant marks on the D language and compiler.
Jan Knepper and Brad Roberts are names we don't often see in copyright notices, but have been key figures behind the scenes running D's infrastructure. If not for their contributions, we would probably not have ever heard of D, as the website wouldn't work! Andrew Edwards deserves a callout for kickstarting off the recent series of DConfs.
David Friedman left his mark on D by starting the gdc project, producing the first fully, front to back, free software compiler for the D language.
Johannes Pfau and later, Iain Buclaw, would pick this up and bring serious credibility to D by leveraging gcc's broad target support and advanced optimization capabilities to keep it competitive with new upstarts, and the vast experience Iain Buclaw has brought to bear on D for the better part of 14 years now has kept it compatible with use cases the rest of the team didn't even know existed.
Tomas Lindquist Olsen and Christian Kamm are primarily responsible for kicking off the LDC project, later picked up by David Nadlinger (who added ARM support!), and now maintained by Martin Kinkelin.
Without their work, D quite possibly wouldn't work on modern Macs, Android phones, or WebAssembly.
Sean Kelly is primarily responsible for druntime as we know it today. If not for him, D would in all probability be significantly less capable than it is now, notably, it was his Fiber code that allowed Sönke Ludwig's work to get started.
Other notable names that come to mind in this area are Alex Rønne Petersen, Leandro Lucarella, Martin Nowak, Steven Schveighoffer.
Brad Anderson, Mike Wey, Christopher Miller, Lars Tandle Kyllingstad, Vladimir Panteleev, Mike Parker, Jonathan M. Davis, Ketmar Dark, Guillaume Piolat, many, many, many more in writing the libraries that make D what it is.
When it comes to the tooling support, Rainer Schuetze, Brian Schott, and Jan Jurzitza immediately come to mind, and I know there's others, there's a bit of recency bias in my memory.
Laeeth Isharc needs to get special mention for funding and organizing so much D-related work.
I'd call out Paul Backus, David Simcha, Dejan Lekic, Peter Alexander, JMD again, and so many others for new user support over the years, without whom who knows how many people wouldn't have stuck around past the initial hurdles.
And there's a great many I didn't mention here.
Of course, it is possible, even likely, that if many of these individuals weren't there, someone else would have done similar work. So maybe, just maybe, we can say that without them, the project would still exist.
But in the timeline we're living, these are the people who were actually there, who actually did do the work to make these things happen.
Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas.
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