Embracing the GC
I never actually liked the GC in D as it didn't seem to fit in with the general direction of the language, and Walter Bright in D at 20: Hits and Misses says:
Miss: Emphasis on GC
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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As hard as it is to say this, unfortunate code breaking changese are going to be made. But only if they help achieve the goals listed above.
If this is the case then I think it is an incredibly bad choice to name it D or openD or anything similar
Names are really hard, but non compatible things should not share a name.
One of the coolest things the perl community ever did was changing the name of perl at the major version when perl 5 came out. That is so smart!, and should be the way all software projects function.
From the blog post, it sounds like the underlying motivation is not tied to technical aspects but control over the language. If I had invested any of my personal time onboarding onto D and migrated any of my projects to D, I would be concerned about the negative impact these political stunts have on the tech stack.
Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions; like many social conservatives these days, he likes to complain about wokeness and communism, and I would completely understand a community fork simply to remove his control over various parts of the D language.
Also, just for a quick sanity-check: Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that "political stunts" had a "negative impact" on your planned development?
Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions;
I fail to see the relevance of what personal opinions and beliefs he may or may not have. You're making it sound like the goal is not to improve a language ir fix issues, but to take something away from a person just because you disagree with their political opinions. That's hardly good use of anyone's time, and sounds terribly petty behavior.
I wish I had that much free time to be able to waste it being so vindictive about such trifling issues.
Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?
I don't waste my time with meaningless irrelevant stuff. Either a tech stack serves it's purpose, or it doesn't. I don't have enough free time to waste it trying to cancel others.
PLDI is political; in general, any sort of language-design process is political. This is because language is expressive and also constraining, so the expressible and easy-to-express concepts in any language are its de facto default policies.
Social conservatives tend to produce languages which are patrician and sadistic in their demands upon their users; C and Go, D, Hoon and Nock, Hare, and V all come to mind. They see these languages as offering "choice" and power to the end-user, and see languages which have redundant structures and safety, like Ada or Pascal, as "bondage & discipline".
You're likely familiar with the frustration of using designed-by-committee languages, too; say, C++ or Python. These systems tend to evolve social conservatism as a way of preventing an explosion of features, as happened to Perl and is happening to Rust.
Hopefully this is good food for thought. Your choice of language is not politically neutral, but occurs within a social context and has policy implications. Work at a PHP shop for a few years and you'll suddenly care quite a bit about which languages you use!
People can say that everything and anything is political as much as they want, it doesn't make it true.
In this case, we are discussing the leadership of a community project; the leaders are the ones who set policy for the project. In this sense, yeah, it's a political situation.
Given your username, I'm a little surprised that you wouldn't recognize that the leaders of community projects are politically important...
As a primarily python programmer with some embedded C experience, I really liked the promise of Dlang when I first saw it, though somewhat it felt as dead language, especially compared to Rust, Zig or Nim - I would rarely hear about Dlang in my circles and bubbles.
Let's hope OpenD takes off, wouldn't mind tipping my toes in it once again.
Off-topic, but I'm curious why you would put Nim in that list. While I absolutely love the language, I've never heard of anyone using it for anything serious, especially compared to Rust or even Zig. I'd even be surprised if it has more mindshare than D.
(An absolute shame by the way. Nim looks like an absolutely fantastic language.)
I would rarely hear about Dlang in my circles and bubbles.
That's hardly a measure of relevance or technical merit. There's a lot of artificial hype being created around some new projects that have a very tenuous correspondence to their technical merits or problems they actually solve, and social network chatter is hardly a factor in assessing technical merits.
For me, it means people are actively using it (making libraries... making the language better) or in general there is some movement behind it and I think that is actually important for open source projects.