Hacker News Reader

Comment by dukc | Hacker News Reader

The short answer is, I really don't know. There are lots of speculation about that around. The only confident opinion I have is that good does not mean popular and vice-versa.

But since you asked, I think I should make my guess. I think people tend to use what life brings them to. Most will not voluntarily go hunting for the best language the Internet has to offer for them. So the languages become popular by forcing people to learn them, by having them to use them at their jobs or implementing important APIs in them. This means that what the project managers of big organisations have enthusiasm or business reasons to push tends to end up popular, not what is preferred by the common programmer. D is largely a free-time volunteer effort AFAIK so it does not get as much corporate influence than it would get if it were an academic or commercial effort. But again, that is just a gut guess, no research to back this up.

View on HN

I think your second paragraph rings true.

I also think there is a cost to using a non-mainstream technology that is often overlooked or under-estimated. I also think the benefits of non-mainstream languages are often over-stated. In other words, when you really look at the details the cool/niche languages do often have notable drawbacks. I suspect that for most organizations the pro/con or cost/benefit comparisons of C++ vs. D don't often come out in D's favor and never did.

In the early days D chose to use GC which today, and for the past 30 years I have done C++ work professionally, has always been a dis-qualifier (mainly because of the extra memory overhead involved as well as the GC pauses). I have always looked at D with some interest, but never come close to formulating an argument that I could take to my company and suggest we start using D where we currently use C++. C++ almost uncompromisingly holds true to its backwards compatibility goals with C and the early versions of itself. C++ also almost always holds true to its "zero overhead abstraction" goals. D chose GC and replaced its standard library at one point. It is an interesting language for sure, but I think there are some things C++ has done better, from a practical use point of view, at least for the use cases where its use is still justified today, by being a more conservatively designed language.

The ironic thing is that the GC is one of the biggest productivity boosts available to a programmer.

C++ likes to prattle on about zero cost abstractions but the cost is nearly always to the programmer - and even then D does a lot of the zero cost concepts like templates objectively better than C++: Write a struct with N members in C++ (e.g. for autodiff), you're looking at a page full of recursive templates and SFINAE. With D it's orders of magnitude less code because it was specifically designed to avoid this kind of nonsense that C++ has conditioned people to think is worthwhile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com