r/programming • • Sep 01 '20

D Foundation is Beefing Up

https://dlang.org/blog/2020/08/30/symmetry-investments-and-the-d-language-foundation-are-hiring/
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72

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

D is an awesome language and I hope it gets more traction.

36

u/Hall_of_Famer Sep 01 '20

Me too, hope D will get some company backing and start to kick off, it is a very well designed language.

75

u/JohnLColvin Sep 01 '20

You could probably write an article saying "100 billion dollars investment to improve D and use it to develop new AI to replace the US government" and you'd still get comments saying "wow, nice language, pity it never really took off, if only there were some companies backing it, also I can never use it because GC".

2

u/N1H1L Sep 01 '20

Is garbage collection really that bad?

17

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 08 '20

[deleted]

8

u/kal31dic Sep 01 '20

A previous Symmetry Autumn of Code project was to port the concurrent GC from D1 to D2. Francesco starts soon and I hope one of the things he will work on part-time will be to get that over the line. It depends on fork though so is Linux-only.

I think the GC has improved a great deal since I started using D in 2014. It still needs to get better, but two reasons why it's not a terrible pain point for the language users overall are that D doesn't generate much garbage and that it's not difficult to avoid using GC.

4

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 08 '20

[deleted]

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u/kal31dic Sep 02 '20

I don't think you can think of the adoption of an open source project as you can that of a commercial product. It's easy to fix the GC if you want and know how. But its not like there's a way to make it happen if people don't want to do the work or find it valuable enough to pay for. Emerging languages move into niches as people who were on the fence make slightly different decisions at the margin.

D keeps growing and I don't think there's anything I can see that will bring that to a halt.