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Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

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Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#81

Post by vips7L »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #53
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…

It's scary to not have type checks in JavaScript. I do them by eyeballing the code, but ugh. Also all languages you mentioned support complex code and OOP.

Code can be complex in any language. TypeScript itself can produce some really complex types. OOP isn’t a bad thing either; it’s just a tool.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#82

Post by mariusor »

monkeyelite wrote: post #76
mariusor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For game development? I imagine having to use only structs but not classes would be something that forces a "non idiomatic D" experience. Dynamic arrays sound like something that's very useful for a game. I don't know, there are plenty of features that are incompatible with better C that makes D, D. Generally speaking, garbage collection would be the biggest in my opinion.

Yeah this person is asking how to make the smallest executable. They don’t want garbage collection.

Garbage collection was about what I would be missing. I mentioned before what could be missing from OP's point of view.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#83

Post by Koshkin »

pjmlp wrote: post #65
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…

I belive asking the favorite LLM to generate an executable will be the future, just like high level languages drove Assembly development into a niche. Yes it isn't here today, just like it took several decades for optimizing compiler backends to do a very good job. In fact one of the reasons why Matt Goldbolt created Compiler Explorer was to have a way to settle arguments he was having in the games industry.

> LLM to generate an executable

... and the job of a programmer will be to explain, in as precise terms as possible, what they need the executable to do. (Reminds me of the idea of programming based on a natural language.)

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#84

Post by pjmlp »

Koshkin wrote: post #83
pjmlp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I belive asking the favorite LLM to generate an executable will be the future, just like high level languages drove Assembly development into a niche. Yes it isn't here today, just like it took several decades for optimizing compiler backends to do a very good job. In fact one of the reasons why Matt Goldbolt created Compiler Explorer was to have a way to settle arguments he was having in the games industry.

> LLM to generate an executable ... and the job of a programmer will be to explain, in as precise terms as possible, what they need the executable to do. (Reminds me of the idea of programming based on a natural language.)

Grace Hopper would find the future of programming so ironic.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#85

Post by bnolsen »

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…

Regarding ruby and python I thought the 2 were in the same league, esp compared to perl. Over 20 years ago I evaluated both and went ruby because of the more consistent api and of course pythons forced whitespace is an easy tie breaker against it. At this point I'm not to pleased that many younger programmers that python as some sort of default and tend to end up writing far too fancy code in it when it ends up being the wrong tool.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#86

Post by bnolsen »

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…

Having coffee almost 30 years in c++ I really good tired of the complexity of it. Some of the newer complexity being workarounds for (in retrospect) poor decisions made decades ago. Build system situation never helped, and I still despise cmake. When D came out I was interested but garbage collection immediately turned me off, in my opinion the boost shared pointers (later adopted into the standard) solved and shut the door on memory leaks as a serious issue.

And then the d2 fiasco sort of blew it all up. Doesn't help that the language always felt very heavy to me. Likewise Rust feels heavy and cumbersome itself.

So it ends up that I'm another one of those who feels the itch getting scratched by zig.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#87

Post by monkeyelite »

mariusor wrote: post #82
monkeyelite wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this person is asking how to make the smallest executable. They don’t want garbage collection.

Garbage collection was about what I would be missing. I mentioned before what could be missing from OP's point of view.

Ok. I think the better C mode is cool and I think it’s worth a try for his interest and project.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#88

Post by LugosFergus »

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…

I found the lack of mature tooling to be hugely problematic. The Visual D extension always felt flimsy and unreliable when debugging D.

DUB also exhibits weird behavior. For example, I wanted it to produce separate debug and release binaries, which it won't do out of the box. Instead, it'll create the same binary for both configurations. Changing that behavior was more difficult than it needed to be. Maybe it's changed since then, but I didn't have a pleasurable experience.

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#89

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

How did you build the rust project? The docs say:

> Most Rust programmers don't invoke rustc directly, but instead do it through Cargo. It's all in service of rustc though! If you want to see how Cargo calls rustc, you can

$ cargo build --verbose

Re: Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

#90

Post by WalterBright »

zerr wrote: post #47
WalterBright wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any plans to implement Swift like C++ interop?

D can do C++ interop when the C++ code is "C with classes" style. Some templates are supported. But then things get so complicated with C++ that it's impractical to go further.
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