Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

dlang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 167 posts

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#81

Post by steveklabnik »

z3t4 wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The Rust community is extremely hostile, especially against other languages, and D in particular.

Where do you see that happening? I'd love to tell some people to cut it out!

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#82

Post by lispm »

vram22 wrote: post #79
yvdriess wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several languages seem to share this curse. You do see companies advertise it on language conferences or websites: Jane Street for OCaml, Remedy Entertainment for D-lang, Naughty Dog and ITA for Common Lisp. But you are often left wondering if it is the tip if the iceberg, or an accurate reflection of industry use. In the case of CL, you see multiple commercial implementations still being supported, indicating much m…

>ITA for Common Lisp. >A pattern I seem to observe is that if the program/framework/platform grows large and successful enough, the company gets acquired for its tech and everything gets rewritten in some more 'industry standard' language. I wonder if that happened for ITA's software after ITA was acquired by Google (for some hundreds of millions, IIRC). I read somewhere that Paul Graham's ViaWeb, which was written i…

Probably it's not that easy to replace Lisp for something else at Google, since it implements a relatively complex search engine core. Thus it's still used. I guess they WOULD be happy to replace it, since Lisp is otherwise not used much at Google, AFAIK. ITA/Google also developed another complex application using Lisp (a reservation system for airlines, initially for Air Canada), but that wasn't successful in the market.

At Viaweb Lisp was used for an early web store maker (enables people to have their own webshop) implementation.

> company gets acquired for its tech

Actually companies get bought for a business model, customers and some amount of tech. Reimplementing earlier approaches, even multiple times, even multiple times with different technologies, seems to be normal in the web business.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#83

Post by tombert »

z3t4 wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The Rust community is extremely hostile, especially against other languages, and D in particular.

Really? The few times I've used Rust, the people on the IRC channel were really nice to me and helped me get bootstrapped.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#85

Post by nonsince »

tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The main reason the way I see it is that a lot of people who still use C and C++ need maximum speed, and D is only memory-safe with its garbage collector enabled. This affects latency and adds overhead. For many cases using a garbage collector is fine, but D was trying to target video games and other spaces where the GC was not acceptable. So D allows you to turn the GC off, but then it's just a vastly less-mature C++ with similar safety footguns and worse library support. Rust actually fills a space that wasn't filled by anything else - memory safety without a garbage collector. You can write pretty ergonomic code in Rust (similar to how code would look in a dynamic and/or GC'd language) just like D, but where in D you would have to choose between highest-possible efficiency and safety, Rust gives you both at the same time.

This isn't to say that Rust is better than D, but it is to say that Rust targets a gap in the market whereas D is trying to have the same tradeoffs as C++ but be better, which is nowhere near as compelling for most developers who've invested a lot of time into learning C++. C++ developers don't use D for the same reason that most people don't switch from qwerty to dvorak even though it's technically more efficient. It's not such a qualitative change that it's worth the retraining.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#86

Post by josefx »

tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

> I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D.

D is still build around a GC so it doesn't really fit into a discussion about GC free languages. Unless you want to focus on its "better C" subset, which I think puts it at a disadvantage compared to any language not fundamentally designed around the presence of a GC.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#87

Post by sdegutis »

WalterBright wrote: post #11
hardwaresofton wrote: post #8

I would have liked to hear more about what exactly made D so great -- reading through it it's kind of vague. He mentions generics and finally getting LLVM support working as a target, and being able to use D at a high and low-level but I don't see anything here that's groundbreaking. Could someone who uses D Hate to be that guy, but if you could compare it with rust that would be double A++ good... I know the targets…

My experience, which of course is anecdotal, is that the advantage is it's easy to change the algorithms and data structures. I've maintained C and C++ code bases for decades, and I've found that the first algorithm I tried has stayed there in the code. It gets tweaked, optimized, refactored, but it's the same algorithm and data structure. With D, when I developed the Warp preprocessor, https://github.com/facebookarc…

Go also does this, although I never appreciated how useful it is until you made that point. Thanks for that. Also thanks for writing D, it was great to read through it's documentation, and I've been meaning to play around with it.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#88

Post by DeepYogurt »

z3t4 wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The Rust community is extremely hostile, especially against other languages, and D in particular.

In my experience the rust community has been incredibly welcoming and nice.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#89

Post by pjmlp »

nonsince wrote: post #85
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The main reason the way I see it is that a lot of people who still use C and C++ need maximum speed, and D is only memory-safe with its garbage collector enabled. This affects latency and adds overhead. For many cases using a garbage collector is fine, but D was trying to target video games and other spaces where the GC was not acceptable. So D allows you to turn the GC off, but then it's just a vastly less-mature C+…

On what concerns video games, all major engines do use GC on gameplay code, including variations of C++ GCs.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#90

Post by pjmlp »

z3t4 wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The Rust community is extremely hostile, especially against other languages, and D in particular.

Not at all, they even put up with my schizophrenic arguments of C++ vs Rust vs whatever.
Post reply on HN