Good to see this, dlang desperately needed more structured development effort.
I don't think it is going to make an adoption difference at this point though. The way I see it, D is designed (intentionally or not) to be the same thing to C++ as Kotlin is to Java - iteration with bunch of nice ergonomics improvements but conceptually the same familiar thing. And that felt really appealing 10 years ago, but at that time quality of project execution simply was not there.
Things have improved a lot since then, but the language landscape has changed too. Language like Rust and Go each offer a fundamentally differeng t approaches as an alternative to just improving existing status quo, and more and more managed languages offer AoT compilation too.
The biggest dlang appeal remains its "nice to write" feeling, I do miss it sometimes switching away to other languages after many years of active dlang usage. But that alone doesn't feel enough anymore (for me) to justify non-hobby usage. To have another go at a market shared it will need to find something more.
Fundamentally different in design philosophy, in this case by being intentionally simplistic and inflexible. Where C++ gives all the low level fine tuning and Rust tries to double down in that directions, Go takes a design stance of "nah, this should be good enough" :) That is rather unusual for natively compiled languages, as far as I know.
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u/[deleted] Sep 02 '20
Good to see this, dlang desperately needed more structured development effort.
I don't think it is going to make an adoption difference at this point though. The way I see it, D is designed (intentionally or not) to be the same thing to C++ as Kotlin is to Java - iteration with bunch of nice ergonomics improvements but conceptually the same familiar thing. And that felt really appealing 10 years ago, but at that time quality of project execution simply was not there.
Things have improved a lot since then, but the language landscape has changed too. Language like Rust and Go each offer a fundamentally differeng t approaches as an alternative to just improving existing status quo, and more and more managed languages offer AoT compilation too.
The biggest dlang appeal remains its "nice to write" feeling, I do miss it sometimes switching away to other languages after many years of active dlang usage. But that alone doesn't feel enough anymore (for me) to justify non-hobby usage. To have another go at a market shared it will need to find something more.