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Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

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Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#31

Post by old-gregg »

usrbinenv wrote: post #28

I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe". Examples: * Python preferred over Ruby * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS) * Go is preferred over Crystal and D. While…

Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language".

I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-stakes projects, a wise decision is building on a platform with several deep-pocketed backers.

And for toy/personal projects... do you even need a language anymore? Just ask your favorite LLM to generate you an executable which does what you want (partially joking here).

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#32

Post by Defletter »

Really wanted to like Dlang but I just did not have a good time with it.

One of my projects has a really simple server written in nodejs that's basically (in terms of complexity) just an auth'd chatroom, and I wanted to switch it from using raw tcp sockets to websockets. And since the server is so simple, why not refactor it to another language and see if there's no some performance gains from that? I ended up doing something pretty similar to that "Comparing 10 programming languages. I built the same app in all of them." video from Tom Delalande (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MbTj8DGOP0). I had several working versions of the server in:

- Bun, using Bun APIs (https://bun.sh/docs/api/websockets)

- Dart, using Dart APIs (https://api.dart.dev/stable/latest/dart-io/WebSocket-class.h...)

- Java, using Java-WebSocket (https://github.com/TooTallNate/Java-WebSocket)

- Kotlin, using Ktor (https://start.ktor.io/p/ktor-websockets)

- Rust, using tokio-tungstenite (https://docs.rs/tokio-tungstenite/latest/tokio_tungstenite/i...)

- Zig, using websocket.zig (https://zigistry.dev/packages/karlseguin/websocket.zig/)

- D, using serverino (https://code.dlang.org/packages/serverino)

And Dlang was, by far, the worst experience out of the lot. Firstly is the lack of adequate, comprehensive, and centralised tooling. I almost gave up when dmd could not even compile a freshly init'd project. The impression I got is that you're not really meant to use dmd directly, you're meant to use dub, like how you compile Java projects with Maven/Gradle, not javac. Except that there's also apparently three competing compilers (https://wiki.dlang.org/Compilers)? And good luck remembering the names of the tooling because they're all some random three-letter combination.

Serverino makes heavy use of mixins and attributes (think Java annotations), which is not ideal. But what really killed the deal was (despite using the recommended intellij plugin (https://wiki.dlang.org/IDEs) with the recommended tools installed and setup) not being able to inspect[1] serverino's mixin or its attributes. So I look at serverino's source code, except its source also has mixins... which I can't inspect. I'm not going to use something when I cannot easily ascertain its control flow. And while, yes, I probably should have gone with vibe-d (https://code.dlang.org/packages/vibe-d%3Ahttp) in the first place, mixins and attributes are nonetheless part of the language and the tooling should be able to tell me about them.

- [1] When I say "inspect" I mean requesting the IDE to show me the source/definition so I can see what it is, what it does, and where it's known to be used.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#33

Post by Demiurge »

usrbinenv wrote: post #28

I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe". Examples: * Python preferred over Ruby * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS) * Go is preferred over Crystal and D. While…

> Python preferred over Ruby

... Perhaps what you're describing is having a niche opinion. If you had some opinions, like a preference for "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters" or "I hate indentation", it would certainly seem that the world is against you. But, perhaps, you just really smart and can remember the intention of all the complicated code you wrote a year ago, so you don't even need to write comments, and thats great. However, being special does not mean that some technolgoy is objectively inferior, unless you can actually come up with a provably objective metric.

Overall, the technology that is there, solving most of the problems for most of the cases is the technology that is superior, by the law of the universe, not the other way around.

I don't agree with any of your examples, but I have my own, like Pascal is a better language than C, by many metrics. I can also accept that C, is what people who invented unix, also invented. And that makes Pascal inferior to C, now, as choice for any project that requires that you hire embedded software developers. That's what the universe decided.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#34

Post by WalterBright »

old-gregg wrote: post #31
usrbinenv wrote: post #28

I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe". Examples: * Python preferred over Ruby * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS) * Go is preferred over Crystal and D. While…

Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language". I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-sta…

D's ImportC feature makes it super easy to access C libraries from D code. That means D fits right in with a C ecosystem, as it's no longer necessary to attempt to translate the .h files into D.

It's not perfect, as some people cannot resist using the C preprocessor for some bizarre constructions.

I used to write those bizarre things myself in C, and was proud of my work. But one day I decided to remove them all, and the code was better.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#35

Post by kouteiheika »

Demiurge wrote: post #33
usrbinenv wrote: post #28

I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe". Examples: * Python preferred over Ruby * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS) * Go is preferred over Crystal and D. While…

> Python preferred over Ruby ... Perhaps what you're describing is having a niche opinion. If you had some opinions, like a preference for "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters" or "I hate indentation", it would certainly seem that the world is against you. But, perhaps, you just really smart and can remember the intention of all the complicated code you wrote a year ago, so you d…

> "Everything must be done in as many ways as possible with funky characters"

Are you sure you're not talking about Perl here? Because there are very few "funky characters" in Ruby and code written in it tends to be very readable, more so than Python in many cases.

I agree with OP. While Python is not a bad language, Ruby is a better language in general, and I'm reminded of it every time I have to work in Python (which is pretty often nowadays, due to Python's dominance in ML ).

I can give many examples as to why, but here's a quick toy example to show off the difference in philosophy between Ruby and Python. You have a list of numbers, you want to keep only odd numbers, sort them, and convert them to a string where each number is separated by comma. Here's the Ruby code:

    xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4]
    ys = xs.filter { |x| x.odd? }.sort.join(", ")
Now let's do the same in Python:

    xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4]
    ys = [x for x in xs if x % 2 != 0]
    ys.sort()
    ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in ys)
Or alternatively in a single line (but in more complex cases this gets extremely unwieldy since, unlike Ruby, Python forces you to nest these, so you can't write nice pipelines that read top-to-bottom and left-to-right):

    xs = [12, 3, 5, 8, 7, 10, 1, 4]
    ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in sorted(x for x in xs if x % 2 != 0))
And this matches my experience pretty well. Things I can do in Ruby in one line usually take two or three lines in Python, are more awkward to write and are less readable.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#36

Post by creata »

acehreli wrote: post #27
creata wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincere question, not meant to be a shallow dismissal: Where is D a better choice than C++? In what aspects is it enough of an improvement over C++ to justify using a niche language?

D is technically better than C++ in most features. (It has always lead C++. For example, among about 100 new feauters that C++11 brought, only 2 were not already in D. No C++ designer will ever admit this fact.) D is safer and more productive. It's a joy to write in D because most of the time it feels like whatever you think, you code. This is unlike C++ where you fight the language all the time. C++ is not a product…

> Why would anyone choose C++ for their projects despite the production costs that it brings?

Familiarity, and all the libraries and tools available for C++. I see that D has a section on C++ interop,[0] but it looks about as painful as FFI usually is, and even more painful given how template-heavy C++ code tends to be.

(Completely unrelated: I can't mention FFI without also mentioning how amazing LuaJIT's C FFI is. The developer(s) really nailed it.)

[0]: https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#37

Post by monkeyelite »

acehreli wrote: post #27
creata wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincere question, not meant to be a shallow dismissal: Where is D a better choice than C++? In what aspects is it enough of an improvement over C++ to justify using a niche language?

D is technically better than C++ in most features. (It has always lead C++. For example, among about 100 new feauters that C++11 brought, only 2 were not already in D. No C++ designer will ever admit this fact.) D is safer and more productive. It's a joy to write in D because most of the time it feels like whatever you think, you code. This is unlike C++ where you fight the language all the time. C++ is not a product…

I actually don’t think C++98 was that bad or complex. Yes nobody knew how to use it and wrote Java instead, but I think the hate comes from having code spanning so many different features and idioms that also require a compiler expert to understand.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#38

Post by ofrzeta »

WalterBright wrote: post #34
old-gregg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language". I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-sta…

D's ImportC feature makes it super easy to access C libraries from D code. That means D fits right in with a C ecosystem, as it's no longer necessary to attempt to translate the .h files into D. It's not perfect, as some people cannot resist using the C preprocessor for some bizarre constructions. I used to write those bizarre things myself in C, and was proud of my work. But one day I decided to remove them all, and…

It would be great if D supported something like OpenAPI generator https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator

Maybe it exists and I am just ignorant but it doesn't seem to be in the list of supported languages.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#39

Post by kev009 »

WalterBright wrote: post #34
old-gregg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language". I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-sta…

D's ImportC feature makes it super easy to access C libraries from D code. That means D fits right in with a C ecosystem, as it's no longer necessary to attempt to translate the .h files into D. It's not perfect, as some people cannot resist using the C preprocessor for some bizarre constructions. I used to write those bizarre things myself in C, and was proud of my work. But one day I decided to remove them all, and…

It seems like the parent was trying to paint a situation of you being a bottleneck to success. It seems a bit Schrödinger's BFDL though.. is Linus a bottleneck to the most used server operating system? Did Guido hold back Python? The existence of the GDC and LDC compilers torpedoes toolchain concerns.. I'd be more worried about Java or Golang suffering from some eventual corporate buffoonery.

To the parent's point of startups, betting the farm on something like a particular language out of some sense of superiority might mean you are not focusing on the right problems. But if the founders happen to know a less widely used tool it doesn't seem inappropriate either. The type of employee that can drive a startup or a big tech project forward is not going to be thwarted by a language, and they might find something new to learn fun.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#40

Post by dimgl »

Defletter wrote: post #32

Really wanted to like Dlang but I just did not have a good time with it. One of my projects has a really simple server written in nodejs that's basically (in terms of complexity) just an auth'd chatroom, and I wanted to switch it from using raw tcp sockets to websockets. And since the server is so simple, why not refactor it to another language and see if there's no some performance gains from that? I ended up doing…

> And Dlang was, by far, the worst experience out of the lot. Firstly is the lack of adequate, comprehensive, and centralised tooling. I almost gave up when dmd could not even compile a freshly init'd project.

Yep this also happened to me when I tried D. I love the idea of the language and the syntax is great, but I really don't want to fight my tools when I'm working on a project.

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