On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 20:02:27 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 16:17:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> you can optimize for one niche and do extremely well there, but then you often find yourself stuck in that niche, as Go finds itself today.
>
> Being stuck in Go's niche would be a fantastic situation for D as Go's market penetration might be 20x that of D. The main limitation for Go is the Go language authors' vision and attitudes. Not really related to the domain.

If it were merely the D team's goal to quickly gain usage like Go, such higher market penetration would be fantastic, but I don't think that's what they're after.  It seems to be unseating C/C++ as the major systems and application programming languages, while simultaneously expanding that market upwards into higher-level domains C++ can't get into today.

That's a longer game, one you don't rush into.  Will D get there? I have no idea, but the recent improvements in C++ imply that new AoT-compiled languages like D, Rust, and Go are at least pressuring C++ to up its game.  In that sense, the new languages can't lose, because even if they go out of use, their best features will already have made it into C++.

But I don't think they have to worry about that, as I suspect the market for AoT-compiled languages is simply becoming more fragmented again, as the scripting languages market has long been.  Each of these AoT languages will likely maintain their own niche, and C++ has so much legacy baggage- they never talk about getting rid of the preprocessor, that's when I'll know they're serious- that at least one of them will displace it at the top, maybe D. :)

On Wednesday, 16 December 2015 at 04:36:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> don't think that's what they're after.  It seems to be unseating C/C++ as the major systems and application programming languages, while simultaneously expanding that market upwards into higher-level domains C++ can't get into today.

I think that  this cannot happen without making asm.js a primary target. Being able to port engines to the browser is just too valuable. Even for compilers...

> been.  Each of these AoT languages will likely maintain their own niche, and C++ has so much legacy baggage- they never talk about getting rid of the preprocessor, that's when I'll know they're serious- that at least one of them will displace it at the top, maybe D. :)

Yes, learning C++ is time consuming. I don't think it will be replaced in a decade, but Swift will take away some from it in the applications area. Just like C++ has taken away from C. Maybe Rust, maybe D3... ;)