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D 2.096 and other news

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Re: D 2.096 and other news

#61

Post by pharke »

bachmeier wrote: post #31
mkhalil wrote: post #29

Tangential to OP's link, I am suprised at how easy creating Windows apps with gtkD is. I figured there would be a lot more steps/configuring/etc. [0: Video link below] Seems quicker to get started on a new app than Visual Studio + W10 SDK? (or other offical MS Libs) Then again...that's not a high bar when it comes to VS. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLft7ynzers&t=410s

Ron Tarrant put together this really nice gtkD blog with 111 posts in it: https://gtkdcoding.com/ Pretty sure he used Windows.

Wow, that's an amazing resource. Thanks for posting it.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#62

Post by kyberias »

What is the point of putting that zero in the version number when it quite clearly is not a decimal number and now it kind of looks like one and is confusing?

Makes me want to avoid D.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#63

Post by Kranar »

bachmeier wrote: post #58
Kranar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progr…

If you had said "No one ever decided not to use D because of the GC" or something along those lines sure... I'd agree. But your claim was "No one ever decided to use any language whatsoever because it didn't have a GC." and that's simply untrue. If C++ got a GC I would immediately stop using it and would have never used it to begin with.

All the rest of your points in your follow up post are very specific to D and yes, those other points are all legitimate reasons people don't use D, regardless of its GC. It's simply that your original claim about language preference on the basis of GC was not specific to D and it's certainly false.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#64

Post by vram22 »

mkhalil wrote: post #29

Tangential to OP's link, I am suprised at how easy creating Windows apps with gtkD is. I figured there would be a lot more steps/configuring/etc. [0: Video link below] Seems quicker to get started on a new app than Visual Studio + W10 SDK? (or other offical MS Libs) Then again...that's not a high bar when it comes to VS. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLft7ynzers&t=410s

gtkD easy only for configuring or for programming too?

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#65

Post by pornel »

petre wrote: post #53
pornel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And there are orders of magnitude more JS programmers. Not every package on DUB is a gem either. So I think overall it's a reasonable proxy for language popularity.

By other measures, like number of committers in open-source projects, it's also small and not growing:

https://www.openhub.net/languages/compare?language_name[]=dm...

GitHub trending struggles to find enough projects to show a full page:

https://github.com/trending/rust?since=weekly https://github.com/trending/d?since=weekly

And of course Golang dwarfs both in popularity. I'm not saying popular is good, but merely answering OP's question about language's growth.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#66

Post by WalterBright »

Kranar wrote: post #9
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…

Certainly D has a lot of support for hobbyists and solo developers, but hasn't seen much adoption from industry. It's a tough language to sell to a large organization. When you're a solo developer D gives you the flexibility and freedom to pursue the many different paradigms that it supports and create your own mini-dialect of the language that suits you perfectly. You can sprinkle some garbage collection here if you…

Sure, you can find better GC support in languages that are built around GC, and you can find better functional support in languages that are built around FP, better OOP support in everything-is-an-object languages, but what D does is enable one to mix & match GC, FP, Metaprogramming, etc., in the same program.

Most D programs I write use a mix of these technologies.

As for metaprogramming, D is very very good at it.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#67

Post by WalterBright »

diegocg wrote: post #37
generichuman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Walter has plans to add ownership and borrowing to D https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in... Not sure what the current state is.

I'll be talking about it at the April nwcpp.com virtual meeting. All are welcome.

Re: D 2.096 and other news

#68

Post by WalterBright »

banachtarski wrote: post #10
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…

As just one anecdote, the mere presence of a GC made me stop looking at D more or less immediately. In terms of positioning, I think D would be better served focusing on a vertical.

You could use D in BetterC mode, and there won't be a GC.
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