On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 21:00:02 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:

I believe your quite wrong, they are "dub-ifing it" making it even the std less official in some ways; and I was told to not even attempt minor redesigns

Upstream thinks dub is the solution and have never deviated in the slightest

On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 20:58:33 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:

Do you have a reference? You currently can globally install packages by editing your dmd.conf / sc.ini, but it's not an easy/standard thing. Are you suggesting a feature for dub to automatically do that?

@WraithGlade

"blessing" will not help it. - Quality will. If package is of good quality - it will automatically become "blessed".

On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 19:30:35 UTC, monkyyy wrote:

That is extremely alarming. Thank you for this very helpful and illuminating information!

I spent some of this morning reading and investigating deeper into this, such as reading the original Open D announcement page more carefully this time compared to the first time it was alluded to and reading a few other related sources and forum posts too.

I also found a link to the contribution bar graph for the D language over time and indeed the contribution rate to mainline D has plummeted to a small fraction of once it once was, starting around ~2018 with a precipitous drop and continuing to decline on average thereafter and now reduced to a small fraction of what it once was.

In contrast, I was previously thinking that Open D was a nascent fork whose influence would probably be mere diversification for the next few years and that mainline D was likely still reasonably healthy and probably even more so than some new competing languages, but after looking into it more today the D language seems far more imminently endangered than I thought.

Its current status as having 3 compilers and seemingly fair viability for real work for the current set of libraries may be mostly the result of preexisting momentum and signs of rapid and existentially risky decay in light of this new contextual information are quite clear now.

This information brings to light such a huge increase in the risk factor of using D that I am now strongly reconsidering using the language at all, especially given I want to ship real software above all else. I cannot even expect that the most important community libraries will have any new updates a few years from now given the rapid rates of likely decay now apparent.

I may just accept working with a less performant and less expressive language, even though I've invested a few months in learning D (reading both books entirely and experimenting) and was enjoying myself.

On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 20:58:33 UTC, Lance Bachmeier wrote:

import std.math;
import user.raylib;

Yeah, the self-contradictory rhetoric of the notion that it can't or shouldn't be done was striking me as quite odd. The fact that several others (at a minimum) have had problems getting these points across and have given up is (I am increasingly suspecting) making me think I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely with D.

That's a shame, since I really would like a saner C++, but if substantive progress and the survival of the language in terms of relevance at large is really as hopeless as it seems then it seems likely wise that I should leave D entirely before I over-invest in an (apparently/probably) systematically rapidly rotting ecosystem.

Maybe I'll check back on the language again a long while from now though. Alas, such a shame... there is/was so much lost opportunity for this language.

On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 21:00:02 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:

Yeah, that does seem like a reasonable strategy to at least make some substantive progress.

On Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 09:13:40 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:

The meaning of "blessing" a library in this context is literally making an official and regular effort to improve the quality of important libraries and make them more seamless and usable for real software, i.e. to increase the quality in all the senses that library quality matters to users. Thus, translating your statement back into the actual meaning of the word "blessed" in the context of this thread results in the following real meaning:

Do you see how this is actually just a nonsensical tautology that results in a blatant self-contradiction?

Frankly, this seems like exactly the kind of out-of-touch circular rhetoric that has historically plagued these forums and some parts of the D community (based on looking at prior threads here and people's commentary in communities outside of D) and seems likely to create the kind of muddled atmosphere that prevents constructive change from happening.

I have noticed this unpleasant pattern before on programming communities though, always with very harmful effects: confusing the emotion of certainty with actual logical certainty born from genuine logical reasoning.

Many programmers become so used to thinking of themselves as being right because they know more than average non-programmers and so adopt the posture of being in the right by default, but context is everything and in reality nobody ever has an a priori "rightness" that can ever be used as a real substitute for genuinely thinking about a different idea when one encounters such an idea.

Dejan Lekic's comment seems like a microcosm of why so many people have become frustrated with D and have simply given up on it since this kind of duplicitous rhetoric seems pervasive and not amenable to change given that years of such attempts have apparently failed. I previously just assumed that was because of programmers being our usual salty and opinionated selves, but the new evidence I've seen today suggests those criticisms hold water. Why else would the contributions have decayed so rapidly to almost nothing compared to much greater prior rates even just a few years ago?

Also, putting the contribution graph aside, on the forums I have noticed that older threads from just a few years ago likewise had a much greater diversity of commentators but that too shows signs of decline in recent years based on my impression.

It's safe to invest in a stable though only moderately large language community, but not a rapidly decaying one.

If this is how it is then it seems I'd be insane to use D in a real shipped project, even though I really wanted to.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory... That's a recipe for a language to have user adoption that essentially behaves like a sieve: quickly losing users at the same rate or faster than it gains them, leaking momentum and losing opportunity constantly.

That being said, to end on a positive note: There's no denying that many aspects of the D language are designed very well and it has a really pleasant feeling as a C++ alternative.

I really hope for a better future in that regard, but I'm not lighting myself on fire for it.

See you guys and gals around and best of luck in all your programming endeavors!

Have a wonderful day/night/week.

If stressed out by these considerations, I suggest going on a nice walk in nature. That always really helps me and nothing is a better way to help ease one's thoughts and resettle or recalibrate one's perspective.

On Wednesday, 2 July 2025 at 18:05:46 UTC, WraithGlade wrote:

I don't have time to read your whole post, but this jumped out at me. This is a graph of contributors to phobos, the D standard library. It's not a graph of contributors to the whole D language.

Phobos had a lot of activity when the functionality was getting built out and when Andrei was more directly involved. The number of contributors fell off because functionality was largely in place and there was uncertainty about what the next steps would be (phobos 3.0, what was the safety/container story).

So I wouldn't necessarily conclude that fewer contributors to phobos is necessarily reflective of the whole language. If you look at the same graph for dmd, you would see contributors more or less flat from 2013 to 2022 and then a modest decline since 2022. That's kind of consistent with what I've observed.

And of course, contributors to dmd aren't the same as people using the D language, but it doesn't have the same issues associated with using phobos contributors as a metric.

On Tuesday, 1 July 2025 at 02:08:57 UTC, WraithGlade wrote:

This forum is for ideas for D Improvment Proposals (DIPs), which are proposals for changes to the language and sometimes tooling. The idea you've put forward here doesn't require a DIP and, therefore, doesn't belong in this forum.

We've got stricter moderation rules in the DIP forums to keep them focused (see DIP forum guidelines linked at the top the page), so I ask that any further discussion on this topic take place in a new thread in the General Forum. You can make a new post there and link back to this one. I'll leave the thread in place, but I'll delete any further posts here.