What problem is D solving ?

To be a modern and sane C++ that C++ could have been, (rather than a complex collection of tacked on languages that C++ is), with modules instead of the the mess of C++'s headers, with instant compilation times that does not need a compilation server farm.

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arcadia_leak 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One good case for it that I see is a viable basis for cross-platform desktop apps. Today, cross-platform desktop GUI apps are either just a snapshot of the website contained inside Electron, or a C/C++ code base with manual memory management. D can serve as a nice middle ground in that space.

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999900000999 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Flutter does cross platform + web and is as close to native as you'll get without writing code directly in Swift, C#, etc.

You're free to start a company and solve a real business problem.

If I became a D expert tomorrow it's not going to make me more money. It's not getting me a better job.

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jpc0 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where is the extensive tooling support for this use case if that is where you think it fits?

Apple is all in on Swift, so you will not be writing native MacOS or iOS code for UI in D, best case you put your business logic in D but you can do that in any language which has bindings to swift/Obj-C.

Android is all in on Kotlin/Java, not D again

Microsoft is all in on C#, again not D.

Linux your two best options for UI is GTK and Qt, C and C++ respectively.

So the only place where you could bave seemless integration is Linux through FFI.

Here's the thing though, for building a core layer that you can wrap a UI around, Rust has insanely good ergonomics, with very good third-party libraries to automatically generate safe bindings to a decent amount of languages, at least all those listed above and WASM for web.

None of those uses cases are painless in D.

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arcadia_leak 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's true that there is no off the shelf tool that you can use right now to write your app, but it certainly doesn't prove that making such a tool is impossible or even complicated.

It makes sense for a complex productivity app (e.g. an office suite editor) to implement the UI from scratch anyway, and for that they may choose D. If Jane Street didn't pick OCaml, it would've died long ago -- in the same manner, some company might pick D to do UI or anything else really.

	▲	jpc0 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is extremely complicated to do so yourself. Handling energy efficiency/a11y/i8n is non trivial in any language, using the paved road of the system's native implementation solves for many of those problems out of the box. You would need to reimplement all of that in D lang for your UI layer, and all you wanted to do was build an application to solve a problem, you weren't in the business of building a UI library to begin with.