Does D have real adoption? Their success stories page lists a few bigger companies that use it for some smaller projects, but nothing about use in big production systems. Is anyone on HN primarily a DLang coder?
It is or was used by some companies in Munich (funkwerk) and a few others. Companies like ebay and netflix have some projects in D. The users are mostly C++ veterans so the forums are full of experienced ppl who can help. I used it heavily in my work for local scripting tasks and even write a small GUI app for our API. Used it mainly instead of Python. It’s basically a safe C with a rich stdlib. There is almost zero syntax overhead and hence if you know C, you should be fluent with D in short time. It is a pragmatic language with some nice functional syntax sugar that makes Scala cry. But the language and the ecosystem struggles with the lack of ppl and overall direction. Contributors tend to complain about long times and endless PR discussions. Some D contribs moved eventually to Rust or Go, which is sad but here we are. I think D deserves more attention than it got and continues to get.
I write D fulltime for my small company, published a framework that 4 other small companies use (or have used). D is really nice for the small ISV, but is also prepared to handle massive codebases (deprecated, packages, gradual typechecks, clear deprecation policies).
The D language has almost become a German preserve, what with the only major adopters being from there. Deutsche Bahn are supposedly using it too for their platform signage.
No doubt Sociomantic Labs, which was acquired in 2014, was a major driving force there. The company was very succesful and hired a lot of the best developers interested in D at that time.
>It is or was used by some companies in Munich (funkwerk) and a few others. There is almost zero syntax overhead and hence if you know C, you should be fluent with D in short time.
I am. Sometimes I write some test cases for D's builtin C compiler, but it's been all D for a while. The compiler itself used to be written in "C with Classes", but it's all D now.
We have a wonderful conference every year in London. The last one was particularly nice - lots of people, everyone had a good time (especially myself).
From a different direction, it was taught in one section of my university's data structures course. We were guinea pigs (https://forum.dlang.org/post/km96ho$2grm$1@digitalmars.com), but I recall the experience being fun and students largely enjoying D. Transitioning to C++/Java in later coursework and professionally was a breeze.
That’s so interesting, I really believe D deserves more highlight because it’s so easily adopted and interops so well with C, yet it’s very high level enough to be scriptable.
Symmetry is a serious trading firm that show up to DConf and similar. Some of their engineers are very enthusiastic about the language and a little bemused that so many people use C++ instead.
I worked for a storage company whose product was written in D. They were later acquired by a larger international company, and I don't know what the fate of the original project was after the transition.
In this world, D was, while not a common choice, also not an unexpected one. The most common language for these sorts of products is C... but it's not the kind of C you'd find in books about the language. It's C that's heavily modded to remove or replace a bunch of stuff. D just happened to align well with what people running the project would've done to C anyways.
Also, in this context the existence of libraries doesn't matter, as almost everything is going to be written from scratch anyways. Nor does learning the language matter, since the internal infrastructure and learning how C was modified to fit the project goals would take the same time as learning another language.
To be honest, I really liked to work in that environment. Not because of any of D's features. I just hate being in the constant fear that I will not be allowed to do something that makes perfect sense, and instead coerced into idiotic workarounds that pretend to solve the problem. Which is what happens when you are required to use third-party libraries and they absolutely don't anticipate your use-case. It's the place where I was closest to being proud of what I was doing. Unlike most day jobs I had, where I felt like I need some extra time in the shower just to not feel dirty by writing code I knew full well should've never been written.
