That is excellent news :)
Congratulations Walter, now let's see D take over the world.
The reference D compiler is now open source
191–200 of 313 posts
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#192Good news indeed. Switched to D 4 years ago, and have never looked back. I wager that you can sit down a C++/Java/C# veteran, and say write some D code. Here's the manual, have fun. They will with in a few hours be comfortable with the language, and be fairly competent D programmer. Very little FUD surrounding the switching to yet another language with D. D's only issue is that it does not have general adoption, whic…
I think a lot of languages that get popular have to have a thing. Like a thing they do well, and hopefully change the world a little... Python had math and has lots more maths now. R also has math and started to kill Python, but now Python has Tensorflow and PyTorch. Scala has Spark. Java has Tomcat, and everything that followed, which is probably 20% of the world's mass by volume. Go has Docker Ruby has/had a railro…
> Does D have a thing?
Probably its most useful feature is rather subtle. It's very easy to express diverse ideas in code in D without having to resort to contortions. It's something people realize after having worked with D for a while.
It is not the result of having feature X (you can always find feature X in other languages or a way to make X work), it's the combination of various X's.
For example, some algorithms express naturally in a functional manner, some imperative, some OOP, etc. It isn't necessary to buy into a manner for the whole program, just use the manner that fits the particular part of the program.
You might like to use FP here and there, but don't want to deal with monads. You can use OOP for the AST, but don't want to box integers into an OOP class. You like dynamic typing for one type, but it's a bad fit for another. You can garbage collect for a quick prototype or a seldom used part of the code, and carefully manage memory for the release or the hot spots. (The Warp preprocessor I wrote did that. https://github.com/facebookarchive/warp)
There's a lot less time hammering square pegs into round holes.
I've seen more than enough presentations on "How To Do Technique X In Language Y" and everyone says how clever that is but the contortions are just too awful to contemplate.
The flip side is that D won't be satisfying to a purist adherent of any of those paradigms.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why does gc disqualify a language as a system's language? AFAIK a "system programming language" should have deterministic performances, obviously Go hasn't. But different people might define "systems" differently.
The people who define Go as a "systems language" use their own terribly useless definition of "systems language". Per wiki: "For historical reasons, some organizations use the term systems programmer to describe a job function which would be more accurately termed systems administrator." So for them, a language that can be used by DevOps Engineers is a systems language. While for sane developers, a systems language i…
Also, does the Go standard "require" a mark+sweep?
If you write an implementation which uses Reference Counting, it can be "deterministic" and won't require a runtime.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#194Good to hear the news, and congrats to all involved. Since I see some comments in this thread, asking what D can be used for, or why people should use D, I'm putting below, an Ask HN thread that I had started some months ago. It got some interesting replies: Ask HN: What are you using D (language) for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193828
Too late to the party to add my answer to your AskHN, but here we go: I use D at Netflix for machine learning backend.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you consider as "fad languages"?
Not going to start a flame war. Everyone has their opinions, However there are languages that come and go, and then are swift to become popular, but then are left to rust, because people stopped having smalltalk about them.
Go is not going anywhere.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go does allocate and free at runtime, it just isn't explicit because its a garbage collected language and the garbage collector handles most of the freeing for you. Different GC'd languages handle allocations differently, some have a keyword, some do it whenever creating an instance of a type over a certain size. With C, C++ and Rust allocating memory often boils down to calling something equivalent to malloc and fre…
Does modern C++ or rust allow you to say "deallocate this pointer here " (like free or delete)? I was under the impression that Rust (and safe_ptr) deallocate at scope end, which could also cause framerate issues (unless you do ugly scope hacks). I do agree that you're unlikely to bump into this issue, though.
Yes, you can explicitly call drop ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html ) in Rust, which just uses move semantics to force it out of scope. A similar function could be implemented in C++, and called like drop(std::move(value)).
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go does allocate and free at runtime, it just isn't explicit because its a garbage collected language and the garbage collector handles most of the freeing for you. Different GC'd languages handle allocations differently, some have a keyword, some do it whenever creating an instance of a type over a certain size. With C, C++ and Rust allocating memory often boils down to calling something equivalent to malloc and fre…
Does modern C++ or rust allow you to say "deallocate this pointer here " (like free or delete)? I was under the impression that Rust (and safe_ptr) deallocate at scope end, which could also cause framerate issues (unless you do ugly scope hacks). I do agree that you're unlikely to bump into this issue, though.
With Rust there is the drop() function in the standard library (which is just a no-op function that takes an owned value as an argument) which allows you to shorten the lifetime of the value without having to do ugly things with blocks.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who define Go as a "systems language" use their own terribly useless definition of "systems language". Per wiki: "For historical reasons, some organizations use the term systems programmer to describe a job function which would be more accurately termed systems administrator." So for them, a language that can be used by DevOps Engineers is a systems language. While for sane developers, a systems language i…
Also, does the Go standard "require" a mark+sweep? If you write an implementation which uses Reference Counting, it can be "deterministic" and won't require a runtime.
Sure, but then you'll leak data every time there's cycles in your data structures.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand: I thought Walter owned the copyright, why does Symantec have anything to do with it?
Symantec purchased Zortech C++, and created Symantec C++. Symantec left that business, and licensed the code to Digital Mars C++, which was later used as a basis for DMD.
I remember using Symantec C++ as well. I was a teenager and on a very tight budget at the time. It was easily the best C++ IDE and compiler you could buy at the time for the price.
I might have to give D a shot now just due to nostalgia.
Re: The reference D compiler is now open source
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you plan to learn a systems language for systems reasons (embedded development, compilers, low-level interfaces, etc) then Rust is the pick. No GC and the option to have no runtime (or a very small one, by default). In other words, if you're looking to replace/supplement your C use: go Rust. If you're looking to replace/supplement your C++ use: probably go D, with some caveats towards actual use. Note: I like both…
> (or a very small one, by default). Some details here... every language other than assembly languages has some amount of runtime. This is Rust's: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/rt.... (as you allude to, many people refer to this amount of runtime as "no runtime" since it's very, very small.) You could also consider some other things as part of a runtime; for example, by default on most plat…
> every language other than assembly languages has some amount of runtime
How are you defining "runtime" such that this statement is correct?