I often hear a lot worse :-) No worries, it doesn't bother me. What pleases me are the people who use D, like it, and tell me they make more money using D because D is much more productive to write code in.
D also attracts expert programmers who are very comfortable using the GC when appropriate, stack allocation when appropriate, malloc/free, even ref counting. These are just tools in the toolbox, like I use socket wrenches, end wrenches, box wrenches, crow foot wrenches, pipe wrenches, monkey wrenches, etc. I don't try to use socket wrenches for everything.
BTW, the GC makes managing memory in compile time function execution trivial. Something that non-GC languages struggle with.
> What pleases me are the people who use D, like it, and tell me they make more money using D because D is much more productive to write code in.
I guess what I've been trying to say is that you would find yourself pleased much, much more often (and D being much more successful) if you recognized and addressed these high-level issues that people have been pointing out for decades, instead of denying them and going on forums telling customers why their expectations are wrong or unnecessary. I'm saying this because D really is a great piece of technology that got a lot of things right, except a few crucial details for some of the most crucial users. And it has had so much potential - potential that has been gradually lost largely because you haven't even recognized the flaws and hurdles that come with it.
It remind me of the infamous Dropbox comment. It's as if you invented FTP, but then whenever people told you it's hard to store & share files, you kept insisting that it's trivial with just a few simple steps on Linux, completely missing the massive market opportunity and the barriers you're telling people to walk through. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
And I'm not saying all this out of out hate for D, but out of (at least past) love for it. I desperately wanted to see it succeed, but I gave up because I realized you simply did not see the Achilles heel that frustrates many of its users and that has held back its potential.
Anyone is free to propose things for D, we have a process for it, or you can just post your idea in the D forum. Many do. You don't have to sit back and hope someone else does it.
He just wants to virtue signal. These people have no idea what sort of hard work it takes to get these things done, and just want to blame people for not being perfect or having perfect foresight.
> He just wants to virtue signal. These people have no idea what sort of hard work it takes to get these things done, and just want to blame people for not being perfect or having perfect foresight.
Not only is this assuming bad faith (against the rules, and kind of insulting) but it's just manifestly false.
Nobody was expecting or complaining about lack of foresight, denying the hard work that went into the language, or blaming anyone for not being perfect. D had a fantastic vision ahead of its time, with a ton of blood, sweat, and tears poured into it, and a ton of people wanted to see it dominate, including me. Yet... it did not, and its lunch (becoming the successor to C or C++ for a large portion of their users) is now being slowly eaten by other languages, most notably Rust.
You hopefully saw [1] that I was not the only one being frustrated with the virality of the GC. It took until DMD 2.066 (2014, some 7 years after D 2.0's release, with years of people complaining repeatedly in the interim -- just a year after Rust's initial release) for enough of the GC's problems to be acknowledged that @nogc was finally introduce to make it even possible to detect the lack of GC in a program. 11 years later, we still aren't even seeing an acknowledgment of the other long-standing, well-known problems I (and others) have gone through great pains to re-outline above -- let alone even a statement that anyone has any intention to even attempt addressing them.
Summarizing all of this as "virtue signaling" and "blaming people for not being perfect or having perfect foresight" when many of us users who have otherwise loved the language were incredibly frustrated with these GC problems and hoping for at least a mere acknowledgement at some point over the past 18 years of hindsight makes for an incredibly gross characterization of both the reality we've faced and everyone's goals here.
I stick by my statement and the response does not refute it. Talking about assuming bad faith (which I didn't) ... get a load of this slander:
"if you recognized and addressed these high-level issues that people have been pointing out for decades, instead of denying them and going on forums telling customers why their expectations are wrong or unnecessary"
It's better than the feedback I would have for, to give an example, Bjarne Stroustrup. Bjarne has spent so far as I can tell almost all of his adult life on C++. It's a huge bloated mess, and though there are many other guilty parties I don't think I can even say he was a good influence.
