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A comment on Driving with D. Parent comment

Re:Driving with D by pizza234 on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @11:39AM (#27356187)
Ultimately, for any language to become popular, it must bring something radically new on the table (e.g. Java: relative performance, simplicity and safety; Python: immediacy; etc.), and/or have a big company behind. D doesn't have any of the two (unfortunately! I do appreciate the language).

This viewpoint is typically represented by the question "what can I do in X that I can't in C++?".

Something I personally find interesting is the thought experiment: if Golang was written by a small actor, and D by a big one, which one would have succeeded?

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Re:Driving with D by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @12:28PM (#27357100)
I don't know that it's essential that a big company be behind a language. What's essential is that the tooling and the libraries be top-notch. That's beyond the reach of an individual, or even a small team. But a large company can easily provide the resources to do that.

(The third essential is that a language do something significantly better or easier than existing languages. A language can't just be "does the same as C, but with a bit different syntax", unless it's radically better syntax. Switching languages has a cost; your new language has to pay back that investment or it won't get used.)

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Re:Driving with D by andai on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @10:25AM (#27369067)
I can't remember where I heard this, but there's a principle that a competing product can't just be 10% better. To justify the cost of switching, it has to be 10X better.
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