Glad to see the momentum behind D finally building! The language has only been 100% open-source for a couple months now, and it already seems to be gaining so much ground.
Code for the official D compiler, the Digital Mars D compiler by Walter Bright, was originally released under a custom license, qualifying as source available but not conforming to the open source definition. In 2014 the compiler front-end was re-licensed as open source under the Boost Software License. This re-licensed code excluded the back-end, which had been partially developed at Symantec. On April 7, 2017, the entire compiler was made available under the Boost license after Symantec gave permission to re-license the back-end, too.
It looks like D could be a really good language for most applications, in particular on linux. People seem to either keep C (unsafe, no abstraction) or python (slow and untyped)… At least D can be reasonably high level (like python) but still very performant. I’m just a bit pessimistic on the chances that languages that have been around for a while suddenly become popular.
s/ironic/realistic/ ;-)
I love OCaml, but I doubt it will ever become popular. Maybe the reason syntax (which is more C-like, something that can help a lot) will change that though, but I will not hold my breath.
oh :) i was thinking of the way ocaml has suddenly seen a spike in popularity over the last few years - it will never be C-level popular, but it definitely feels like it has a lot of momentum and community activity it didn’t have for a long time.
Indeed, some factors made this possible (better tooling with merlin, the opam package manager, …). The community is active, and more people have joined it, but it still is small.
I would love to see D as a viable alternative for Windows development as well, but since both dmd and ldc have a hard dependency on MSVC, I don’t see this to come soon; it makes crosscompilation from Linux quite difficult up to impossible. GDC might be able to fill this hole, but it still is a one-man show and will only very slowly evolve (not to mention what happens if the maintainer loses interest). Also, I have been told GDC produces giant executables for small programs, but that might improve more quickly.
For Linux, I think there are enough easily installable, modern alternatives to C/C++ that I don’t think that that’s a place where D could shine.
really awesome. still holding out hope for D catching on as the default language for desktop gui apps.
That’s great. GDC will then finally move into regular Linux distribution repositories I hope.
(still no D tag?)
Eh, gdc has been in Debian (hence also Ubuntu) for a long time now.
I stand corrected; thanks.
Glad to see the momentum behind D finally building! The language has only been 100% open-source for a couple months now, and it already seems to be gaining so much ground.
I always assumed it was fully open source. Which parts of it were closed?
From Wikipedia:
The other compilers were free the whole time, no?
dmd’s frontend was source available but not {open source, free software}. This changed recently. See @chadski above.
Yes, but the other compilers. I don’t think you can call the language itself non-free if there’s at least one free implementation.
Sure, I’m not arguing that, just trying to state a fact.
It looks like D could be a really good language for most applications, in particular on linux. People seem to either keep C (unsafe, no abstraction) or python (slow and untyped)… At least D can be reasonably high level (like python) but still very performant. I’m just a bit pessimistic on the chances that languages that have been around for a while suddenly become popular.
ironic for an ocaml person to say that :)
s/ironic/realistic/ ;-) I love OCaml, but I doubt it will ever become popular. Maybe the reason syntax (which is more C-like, something that can help a lot) will change that though, but I will not hold my breath.
oh :) i was thinking of the way ocaml has suddenly seen a spike in popularity over the last few years - it will never be C-level popular, but it definitely feels like it has a lot of momentum and community activity it didn’t have for a long time.
Indeed, some factors made this possible (better tooling with merlin, the opam package manager, …). The community is active, and more people have joined it, but it still is small.
I would love to see D as a viable alternative for Windows development as well, but since both dmd and ldc have a hard dependency on MSVC, I don’t see this to come soon; it makes crosscompilation from Linux quite difficult up to impossible. GDC might be able to fill this hole, but it still is a one-man show and will only very slowly evolve (not to mention what happens if the maintainer loses interest). Also, I have been told GDC produces giant executables for small programs, but that might improve more quickly.
For Linux, I think there are enough easily installable, modern alternatives to C/C++ that I don’t think that that’s a place where D could shine.
If you model language usage as a logistic curve then this scenario is perfectly realiseable.