This is he. AMA!
So, as you try to formalize it, I encourage you to try to remove as much ambiguity and processing complexity as possible. Maybe also work with academics who specialize in formal specs or methods that caught many defects in prior language or system specs. The result is that researchers interested in building assurance and QA tools for D will have a much easier time. Just look at how long it took to certify a C compiler vs ML and LISP compilers despite latter languages being much more powerful.
Reason it's important, whether an immediate concern or not, is that much of the best stuff comes from cash- and time-strapped, but smart, academics trying to make a name or push state-of-the-art. Easier your language is to work with, the more of them might choose it. And you've done a really, good job on a C++ replacement that I thought would've had more adoption. So, I'd like to see some of those brains get put on your work, too. :)
Regardless, good luck to you on your next move!
http://wiki.dlang.org/Current_D_Use
And many more companies not in that list.
Remedy is responsible for Alan Wake and Max Payne, Funatics for Cultures, Zanzarah, among others.
Remedy: "integrating D with a typical C/C++ game engine as an extension language for use processing game logic"
Funatics: "D as a replacement for the parts of our infrastructure that use nodejs right now"
Competition is good for all involved. Rust and C++ are the competitors closer to the same turf. I think we have a solid value proposition and several ways to enhance it and differentiate ourselves. Time will tell.
- learning of large-scale classifiers and regressors using custom optimizers
- real-time pricing of billions of ads a day using these models on ad exchanges. <.5ms latency to parse complex bid requests and compute sparse and simd dense dot-products
- a real-time event processing system that hits DynamoDB with ~4.5K json queries per sec on a single node
We literally have D systems deployed on hundreds of ec2 instances as we speak and responsible for mission critical tasks of a >100$M run rate company. D is ready for prime time and works at scale.
It's a fun time.
Not on ARM. I will try again but last time I tried setting up a toolchain (~6 months ago) met with headache, pain, and eventually heartache.
(EDIT sorry, submitted too soon) With regard to targeted users and uses, D is an ample language that could be used for a large range (heh) of applications. I want to make sure the core language and libraries offers a solid support on which various applications, frameworks, and libraries can build.
The advice given in marketing new products is often opposite - find a niche, offer much better value than competitors for that niche ,become the leader of that niche - and use that base to expand.
I wonder if this kind of advice offers a better route for success for a programming language ? What was the case historically ?
Ruby was around for 10 years before Rails released version 1.0. Rails itself didn't get popular until version 2, 4 years later.
It takes a long time for a language to mature to the point to where someone loves it so much they're willing to bet their career on it, as DHH did.
The best thing for a language designer to do IMO is not to try to decide what the killer app is, but rather to make it as nice as possible so that more and more people want to use it to solve problems.
Rails isn't the best web development stack because of any kind of monolithic effort on the part of the Ruby core team. It was built on top of the work of dozens of programmers who did things like write HTTP client libraries, HTML parsing tools, templating languages, all the things that a framework relies completely on.
My advice: You can only focus on so much at once. Let the community build the tools. You build the language. You'll never be able to do both, there just isn't enough time.
There's so much other stuff for you to do. Figure out governance, setting a tone for the community, reaching out to heavyweights so as to raise your profile, working out what your relationship to corporate sponsors is, how you're going to ensure stability across versions, package management. The countless little things that make one language more of a joy to work with than another.
So far I've only been successful with a few shell scripts calling into the tools of the console's SDK doing mass reflection on 75k shader object files among other things. Yet I do half of my home projects in D and absolutely love it.
I think getting D to interopt with more existing code in all of C#, Java and Objective-C as well as on both mobile devices and game consoles will greatly help its adoption with the "oh its just another library we add to our existing codebase" factor which has tremendously helped Clojure take off.
This means D could make it easy to extend both JVM and CLR applications with lighting fast code while getting free access to their respective ecosystems. I for one would love to use D instead of C# to write Unity code.
I don't see the point of compiling D to JVM or CLR byte-code for all the efforts it would involve, but rather the CLR or JVM load native code written in D and have each call into each other easily.
Say I can't reach the performance I want in C# and I want to write that part of the system in D and load it in Unity and then call into native D code from there. Without having to mess with the CLR implementation details. That would definitely allow people to try it out and integrate it gradually until it has completely taken over.
2. is there any plan to include Mobile(mainly iOS/Android) in the D roadmap?
3. any plans to safely use the standard library with GC disabled?
However, there were two concurrent developments. One is Martin Nowak and others did great work on improving D's existing garbage collector. The other trend is that it became increasingly clear that a category of users will always be weary of a GC, be it for the right or wrong reasons. So the better place to hit is to offer a great experience in D without requiring any garbage collection at all.
2. Mobile is an important area for a language like D. We don't have many experts on team to work on that, but we're looking. One thing I can do soon is to encourage ARM support, which right now works only experimentally and in a science project kind of way.
3. I want to make it possible to use a well-defined subset of the standard library without a GC. (The subset part is for legacy compatibility.)
Do you vision D becoming a transpiler platform, similar to JavaScript land where languages target D source ?
x-lang => D => ldc => binary
That said, just as a related aside, there's the Daniel Murphy's magicport program that translates real projects from C++ do D semiautomatically (Daniel used it to translate the D compiler itself; we recently committed to bootstrapping).
On a serious note... what do you think you will miss the most about Facebook?
I want more than empty, front and popFront to manipulate byte buffers with high performance.
I'm thinking about reading data structures, performing bit conversion, and extracting primitive values from untyped byte arrays. Going as far as to reuse the array's memory for the values being read which isn't possible with ranges.
How about adding a byte buffer concept alongside with ranges? I'm thinking an API similar to Netty's ByteBuf but using D's compile-time capabilities instead. These would be valid ranges as well but offer direct byte access on top.
It would be great if the reflection info could be outputted to a separate file for those cases where its only needed during program initialization or used by external tools.