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

D 2.096 and other news

dlang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 86 posts

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#51

Post by petre »

elromulous wrote: post #6
butterisgood wrote: post #2

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

Imho, D's choice to be garbage collected has prevented wider adoption (that's the case for my usage at least). And as a compiled gc language, it competes squarely with golang, something that's likely hard to do, given the corporate (google) support golang has. Side note: I met the creater of D, Walter Bright (also of course famous for the digital mars compiler) at going native 2013 (now known as cppcon). Bright was t…

I like the GC so I don't have to bother with manual memory management. It also a simpler GC which works quite predictably and one could work with it or around it. I hope it stays in the language. One could use @nogc if they don't want it. D's GC is also configurable:

https://dlang.org/spec/garbage.html

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#52

Post by vips7L »

generichuman wrote: post #28
elromulous wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho, D's choice to be garbage collected has prevented wider adoption (that's the case for my usage at least). And as a compiled gc language, it competes squarely with golang, something that's likely hard to do, given the corporate (google) support golang has. Side note: I met the creater of D, Walter Bright (also of course famous for the digital mars compiler) at going native 2013 (now known as cppcon). Bright was t…

They're replacing a lot of GC'd standard library functions with @nogc functions, so people might not have to depend on the GC soon. Some people were also working on a reference counted type (that'd replace the GC I guess?) a few years ago, but I don't know what happened to that, or if it did make into the language. There are a few open RC pull requests from 2019 on the d runtime repository.

Here is a library for smart pointers: https://github.com/atilaneves/automem

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#53

Post by petre »

pornel wrote: post #47
butterisgood wrote: post #2

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

According to http://www.modulecounts.com crates.io adds more packages in a month than there are on DUB in total.

Node.js adds several orders of magnitude more packages as well. That doesn't mean much, other than that a lot of disputable quality packages are added, introducing needless entropy and dependency hell. I compiled a simple Rust program (pueue) a few weeks ago which pulled ~290 deps, which served as a reminder, although nothing broke compared to node and also no deprecation and security warnings. Golang is no different.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#54

Post by stelonix »

nix23 wrote: post #49
stelonix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I got fed up with C++ for good and have no interest in touching it anymore. There's just a sheer amount of complexity and lack of free (as in beer) tooling that has driven me mad these past years until I finally gave up last month. Then I checked D and I wanted to try it, but couldn't get a Rider/IntellliJ (can't recall) plugin to work, so I also marked it as lack of tooling; I also couldn't find many code e…

You should checkout Go it sounds you have work to be done, and Go was exactly made for that.

I looked at Go but the lack of generics didn't help, so I ditched it. I'm very excited about it now that they're considering adding it though. Thanks for the tip, I'll check out what changed in the meantime!

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#55

Post by mhh__ »

crazypython wrote: post #3

Daily downloads of D have been growing rapidly for some time now: http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

They may have trippled since that site stopped updating. I'm still working out what we can actually claim as traffic but the unique IP count per day seems to have jumped by quite a bit

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#56

Post by mhh__ »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #48

How dependent is D nowadays on GC?

The GC is still a key part of the language but it is increasingly only used for things that you wouldn't be able to do without a GC anyway (e.g. if you want to pass a closure anywhere without managing it's lifetime you need some kind of GC).

Avoiding the GC has probably never been easier however, and D is already very good at avoiding the garbage in the first place.

I even work on/for D and I'm not a huge fan of the GC, but it is also the case that these questions pop up on sometimes almost quasi-religious grounds: The GC is just a tool, if it gets in your way it's fairly easy to avoid in the sense that you don't call in, it doesn't stop.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#58

Post by bachmeier »

Kranar wrote: post #50
bachmeier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As just one anecdote, the mere presence of a GC made me stop looking at D more or less immediately. A lot of people say that, but that's the tip of an iceberg of 500 items that will prevent someone that doesn't want GC from using it. In other words, nobody ever used a language only because it didn't have a GC.

If you're being absolutely extreme then sure that's true. I'd still use Ruby with it's garbage collector to implement a video game instead of using Brainfuck even though Brainfuck doesn't have a GC. But if we're being reasonable, then I can say me and my company mostly still use C++ because it doesn't have a GC. It's an otherwise horrible language and I'd love to get off it. For a new project making an order matching…

> If you're being absolutely extreme then sure that's true.

I wasn't being extreme. I was making a statement based on year after year seeing people make the same claim. After the GC is gone, then it's the legacy C++ code, the lack of documentation, the lack of developers experienced with C++, the tooling, various language issues, and on and on.

The thing is, you can already disable the GC and slap @nogc on your program and you don't have a GC. Or compile with the -betterC flag and you don't have a GC. It's not like D requires using the GC. When you say that, the reply is "Yes, but..." followed by issues using D as @nogc.

> we are experimenting with Rust as an alternative and it's looking very promising. I want to see a bit more how the async situation plays out because that aspect of the language has me concerned but overall it's a really clean and principled language.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The GC is only one of many reasons you're not using D and probably never will. And that's okay, because if you remove the GC, someone like me will never look twice at the language.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#59

Post by mhh__ »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #43
crazypython wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5. The forum is very helpful, and I was able to get my issues fixed without anyone telling me to RTFM or being mean D forum is one of the most gracious and nice. There is a lot of gratitude.

They also really know their stuff. I suppose that's an advantage of all less mainstream languages and tools, but D's community is particularly impressive. Another way of putting it: in the C++ community, the average person on a forum is never going to have a seat on the C++ standards commitee. They'll never even get close. With a smaller community like with D, you can find forum threads where the forum regulars are d…

Also keep in mind that that pretty small community is able to do what we've done already, e.g. D can pretty much catch C++ exceptions!

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#60

Post by _veelo »

butterisgood wrote: post #2

Anyone able to report on the growth of the D community at all? Lots of press lately goes to Go and Rust. I even hear about Zig more than I hear about D these days. Yet I know of at least one company putting their eggs in the D basket (Weka). Just curious if anyone else feels like this is kind of risky compared to other more-established options. (obviously chicken and egg issues exist). Haven’t used D in quite a few y…

I work for another company also putting its eggs in the D basket (SARC). We do not consider this risky because of two main reasons:

1) D is not dependent on the funding of one big corporation, so our future is not at the mercy of such corporation.

2) Three highly compatible compilers exist, all of them libre. Inclusion into gcc is probably the best insurance for any language.

The D community may be comparatively small, but for us it is big enough. Changes in and around the language may happen comparatively slowly, but for us they happen fast enough. Tooling may be comparatively limited, but we are actually rather impressed by what is available.

The language itself is of course awesome.

Post reply on HN