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

Better C – A subset of D Programming Language

dlang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 360 posts

Re: Better C – A subset of D Programming Language

#12

Post by WalterBright »

dgellow wrote: post #8
WalterBright wrote: post #4

Walter here - AMA!

Do you know of use of “BetterC” in real-life (i.e: for non-pet projects)? It would be interesting to hear about some real use cases.

I know several people like it and use it very much, but I haven't followed their projects. Many were skeptical of the BetterC project, but it has proven its worth.

I've used it myself to easily convert some of my older C programs to D and make them easier to maintain.

Re: Better C – A subset of D Programming Language

#16

Post by WalterBright »

F-0X wrote: post #3

One thing that really annoyed me about D is that its documentation lists basically every function with an 'auto' return type. Auto should be completely banned from documentation, it's a complete hindrance. It's the single biggest contributor to why I stopped using D for personal projects - I was so tired of having to hunt down what functions are going to return, sometimes having to resort to just using it and looking…

It's helpful to bring up issues you are encountering in the D forums. This is the first I've heard of this particular one.

Re: Better C – A subset of D Programming Language

#17

Post by slezyr »

WalterBright wrote: post #5
F-0X wrote: post #3

One thing that really annoyed me about D is that its documentation lists basically every function with an 'auto' return type. Auto should be completely banned from documentation, it's a complete hindrance. It's the single biggest contributor to why I stopped using D for personal projects - I was so tired of having to hunt down what functions are going to return, sometimes having to resort to just using it and looking…

You don't have to wait for the compiler to complain. Using: pragma(msg, T); where T is any type will print the type to the screen during compilation. pragma(msg) will print all kinds of things, making it a very handy tool to visualize what is happening while compiling. I use it all the time.

Print-debug you program before it's even compiled and even have a bug is a bag idea.

Re: Better C – A subset of D Programming Language

#18

Post by p0nce »

F-0X wrote: post #3

One thing that really annoyed me about D is that its documentation lists basically every function with an 'auto' return type. Auto should be completely banned from documentation, it's a complete hindrance. It's the single biggest contributor to why I stopped using D for personal projects - I was so tired of having to hunt down what functions are going to return, sometimes having to resort to just using it and looking…

It's often because these functions have unnamed types. Chain of lazy computations in D often return unnamed types (so called "Voldemort" types) because finding good names for those inner structs is a challenge, they have a single use (which is to have a particular signature).

Re: Better C – A subset of D Programming Language

#20

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ahartmetz wrote: post #9
F-0X wrote: post #3

One thing that really annoyed me about D is that its documentation lists basically every function with an 'auto' return type. Auto should be completely banned from documentation, it's a complete hindrance. It's the single biggest contributor to why I stopped using D for personal projects - I was so tired of having to hunt down what functions are going to return, sometimes having to resort to just using it and looking…

Ugh, that is even more ill-advised than using auto without good reason in C++.

In the interests of perpetuating this endless flamewar, here's Herb Sutter saying C++ programmers should use auto 'by default'.

(I see my snarky comment there got no reply.)

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/180616/

Post reply on HN