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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, so this is the author of D. I've never seen D actually used anywhere. Honestly, I think he missed the biggest thing - being employed by a large company that will push your platform. From the Wiki page, D sounds like a replacement systems programming language, but I've never heard of it while Google's Go system programming language replacement is all over the place. Similarly Sun, now Oracle, and Microsoft push languages that actually get used.

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The first thing that jumped out at me in the (very interesting I thought) article was this; "If you need validation and encouragement from others, it isn't going to happen". In other words, you need a thick skin as well as technical ability. I remember Walter Bright achieved a certain amount of fame in the programming community back in the 80s by writing and productizing outstanding C and C++ compilers for MS-DOS when that was an important market with big competitors including MS and Borland. He seems to have been plugging away with D, conceived as a better successor for C than C++ for a long time now. I suspect that the reason that C++ is ubiquitous while D remains relatively obscure has a lot more to do with inertia and momentum than the objective merits of the two languages. It's a tough field to get traction in with so many brilliant and opinionated critics and competitors. My impression is that Walter Bright is an outstanding programmer who deserves more recognition and kudos.

MS and Borland produced C++ compilers long after Zortech C++ proved the market for them on MS-DOS.

I was lucky in that Zortech C++ came out just as the market for C++ exploded (and it might even be that ZTC++ was the case of that explosion).

Thanks for replying. I feel a Wayne's World moment coming on... "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy...". Congratulations on a wonderful body of work. I am going to use this moment to motivate myself to push my own projects forward. Of course I'm not trying to write my own language (that would be crazy...).

D is being used on an "experimental" basis at Facebook:

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3019948/more-about-d-language-and-...

That said, you're right. Rust and Go both have momentum, and they've both had big backers behind them.

Is anyone actually using Rust in production? There's a lot of excitement around it in the HN echo chamber, but I'm not sure how far that translates to real world use.

Since it's not very stable yet, production use is actively discouraged. I do know Tilde is using Rust for Skylight (http://skylight.io), but I don't know how far from production they are.

Skylight itself is still not quite out of beta, but iirc ever since reimplementing their monitoring and instrumentation in Rust they've been allowing their paying customers to opt into it (with the alternative being to stick with the older Ruby-based implementation).

For another company currently using Rust despite our frequent warnings, see OpenDNS: http://www.opendns.com/

And now you have heard of D! See, my eeevil plan is working!

Yep, actually Steve Yegge has a rant saying that his friend Walter Bright (creator of D) didn't care enough about marketing.

So? Java's success can be largely attributed to Sun's marketing push. On the other hand, no corporation stands behind a language like Lua which is enjoying success. Same for a language like Julia (though very young, it has clearly managed to attract attention).

Well one other difference is that D is a systems language, and Go is nothing even remotely close to a systems language but initially claimed to be one. There is not much demand for a new systems language, most people are happy to use higher level languages for what they do these days. Most go converts are coming from python and ruby, not C++.

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