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D Programming Language

dlang.org

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Re: D Programming Language

#61

Post by ender341341 »

jakkos wrote: post #51

I often see people lament the lack of popularity for D in comparison to Rust. I've always been curios about D as I like a lot of what Rust does, but never found the time to deep dive and would appreciate someone whetting my appetite. Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)?

I think 3 things

1. D had a split similar to python 2 vs 3 early on with having the garbage collector or not (and therefor effectively 2 standard libraries), but unlike python it didn't already have a massive community that was willing to suffer through it.

2. It didn't really have any big backing. Rust having Mozilla backing it for integration with Firefox makes a pretty big difference.

3. D wasn't different enough, it felt much more "this is c++ done better" than it's own language, but unlike c++ where it's mostly a superset of c you couldn't do "c with classes" style migrations

Re: D Programming Language

#63

Post by bmacho »

aki237 wrote: post #17
that_guy_iain wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Genuinely curious as I'm relatively new compared to the time of inception of this language. Can you cite the reasons why people didn't choose D?

"We all know of the language and chosen not to use it."

Is a strange claim, and hard to cite. But I think many HNers have tried out D and decided that it's not good enough for them for anything. It is certainly advertised hard here.

Maybe you should Ask HN.

Re: D Programming Language

#64

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

jakkos wrote: post #51

I often see people lament the lack of popularity for D in comparison to Rust. I've always been curios about D as I like a lot of what Rust does, but never found the time to deep dive and would appreciate someone whetting my appetite. Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)?

> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't?

Yes. D tried to jump on the "systems programming with garbage collection" dead horse, with predictable results.

(People who want that sort of stupidity already have Go and Java, they don't need D.)

Re: D Programming Language

#65

Post by 4gotunameagain »

einr wrote: post #32
4gotunameagain wrote: post #11

D is like a forced meme at that point. Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement. No matter how much better it is from C now, C is slowly losing traction and its potential replacements already have up and running communities (Rust, zig etc)

Not everything needs to have "traction", "excitement" or the biggest community. D is a useful, well designed programming language that many thousands of people in this vast world enjoy using, and if you enjoy it too, you can use it. Isn't that nice?

Oh a programming language certainly needs to have traction and community for it to succeed, or be a viable option for serious projects.

You can code your quines in whatever you'd like, but a serious project needs existence of good tooling, good libraries, proven track record & devs that speak the language.

Re: D Programming Language

#67

Post by that_guy_iain »

nottorp wrote: post #55
that_guy_iain wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be serious, most people are regulars and this has been on the front page multiple times like constantly. And it was upvoted 4 times on new to get to the front page rapidly. It's not something new that we're all "Oh that's cool". We also know there are tons of sock accounts. And no half of the posts on front page can't be put in that since they aren't constantly reposted like this. So, while there are a few peop…

Do you know the joke with "I'll repeat the joke to you until you understand it?". That's why some things get reposted and upvoted. In hope of getting someone else to understand them. By the way, do you complain about sock accounts when yet another "Here is this problem, and by the way we sell a product that claims to solve it" gets upvoted?

> Do you know the joke with "I'll repeat the joke to you until you understand it?".

Nope. That's not a joke. That's not funny.

> That's why some things get reposted and upvoted. In hope of getting someone else to understand them.

No, they get reposted and upvoted by sock accounts in hope that someone will finally be interested in a 30 year old programming language.

> By the way, do you complain about sock accounts when yet another "Here is this problem, and by the way we sell a product that claims to solve it" gets upvoted?

What does content marketing have to do with sock accounts?

I'm honestly not sure what point you thought was getting made. Do you honestly think people don't understand D? It's been looked at repeatedly and still nothing cool is built in it.

Re: D Programming Language

#68

Post by tmtvl »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #64
jakkos wrote: post #51

I often see people lament the lack of popularity for D in comparison to Rust. I've always been curios about D as I like a lot of what Rust does, but never found the time to deep dive and would appreciate someone whetting my appetite. Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)?

> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? Yes. D tried to jump on the "systems programming with garbage collection" dead horse, with predictable results. (People who want that sort of stupidity already have Go and Java, they don't need D.)

Go wasn't around when D was released and Java has for the longest time been quite horrible (I first learnt it before diamond inference was a thing, but leaving that aside it's been overly verbose and awkward until relatively recently).

Re: D Programming Language

#70

Post by tmtvl »

pjmlp wrote: post #21
tjr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your proposition that programmers are now incapable of writing code?

Eventually yes, when incapable becomes a synonymous with finding a job in an AI dominated software factory industry. Enterprise CMS deployment projects have already dropped amount of assets teams, translators, integration teams, backend devs, replaced by a mix of AI, SaaS and iPaaS tools. Now the teams are a fraction of the size they used to be like five years ago. Fear not, there will be always a place for the few o…

While I don't share this cynical worldview, I am mildly amused by the concept of a future where, Warhammer 40,000 style, us code monkeys get replaced by tech priests who appease the machine gods by burning incense and invoking hymns.
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