Monoculture == good?

Being a performance-minded person, I wanted to compare the speed of my dependency injection / inversion of control container, dconstructor, to the speed of other popular IoC containers. Since I am most familiar with C#, my first thought was to try Castle Windsor.

My day job involves programming in C# on Windows, but at home, I use Linux exclusively. So this means using Mono. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Castle Windsor does not work on Mono. It has dependencies on C#3.5 libraries that are only partially implemented in Mono.

I began to consider, at this point, the relative situation between Mono and D. In the past, I have gotten internal compiler errors in both, and much more frequently than I would expect with a production-quality compiler. In Mono, these usually related to libraries -- perhaps with Castle, sometimes; never with any library I thought might typically be developed with Mono. In D, it was usually my code, though I'll grant that my D code involves fewer libraries in many cases.

The primary issue is that C# libraries can target two platforms, one of which is significantly more stable and has a more extensive standard library and much larger installation base. There was a time, I am told, when C# libraries would contain workarounds for differences and errors present in Mono and not in .NET, but this attitude is no longer prevalent.

In D, there is only DMDFE. All libraries target it.

Another helpful element is that the primary way to distribute a library with D is by source. It's quite doable to fix up problems in a library that come about as a result of compiler and stdlib differences. There's not much you can do with an opaque DLL. This makes problems seem more insurmountable than they might be.

All told, though, I think that D's relative monoculture is a good thing. There are two or three teams independently working on the same open source codebase, so there's less worry about D suddenly going away if Walter ceases to distribute it. But I can assume that any maintained library in D will continue to work with up-to-date compilers.

That might change when Dil comes around, but I still look forward to Dil. I've seen DMDFE, after all.