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D Programming Language

dlang.org

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Re: D Programming Language

#71

Post by flohofwoe »

kitd wrote: post #20
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)

Python was first released in 1991. It rumbled along for about 20 years until exploding in popularity with ML and the rise of data science.

Python had already exploded in popularity in the early 2000s, and for all sorts of things (like cross-platform shell scripting or as scripting/plugin system for native applications).

Re: D Programming Language

#72

Post by tmtvl »

trwired wrote: post #50
kitd wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was popular as a teaching language when it started out, along side BASIC or Pascal. When the Web took off, it was one of a few that took off for scripting simple backends, along side PHP, JS and Ruby. But the real explosion happened with ML.

I agree with the person you're replying to. Python was definitely already a thing before ML. The way I remember it is it started taking off as a nice scripting language that was more user friendly than Perl, the king of scripting languages at the time. The popularity gain accelerated with the proliferation of web frameworks, with Django tailgating immensely popular at the time Ruby on Rails and Flask capturing the mi…

As I remember it there was a time when Ruby and Python were the two big up-and-coming scripting languages while Perl was in decline.

Re: D Programming Language

#73

Post by badsectoracula »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #5

[flagged]

As evidenced by several other comments, even if someone already knows about D they can still use posts like this as a prompt for talking about their experiences and current thoughts about it (which can be different from 1, 5 or 10 years ago).

Re: D Programming Language

#74

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

D is a treasure we should continue to cherish and protect

A language with sane Compile Time features (Type Introspection, CTFE, mixins, etc)

A language that can embrace C ecosystem with sane diagnostics

A language that ships with its own optimizing code generator and inline assembler!

A compiler that compiles code VERY fast

A compiler with a readable source code that bootstraps itself in just 5 seconds

People who dunk on it "bEcAuSe iT Is nOt MaInsTrEaM" are clueless

Re: D Programming Language

#75

Post by badsectoracula »

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)?

One feature of D that i really wish other languages would adopt (not sure about Rust but i also think it lacks it, though if it has it to a similar extent as D it might be the reason i check it again more seriously) is the metaprogramming and compile-time code evaluation features it has (IIRC you can use most of the language during compile time as it runs in a bytecode VM), down to even having functions that generate source code which is then treated as part of the compilation process.

Of course you can make codegen as part of your build process with any language, but that can be kludgy (and often limited to a single project).

Re: D Programming Language

#76

Post by Rounin »

As far as adoption is concerned, I'm not sure it should be that big of a concern.

After all, D is supported by GCC and Clang and continually being maintained, and if updates stopped coming at some point in the future, anyone who knew a bit of C / Java / insert language here could easily port it to their language of choice.

Meanwhile, its syntax is more expressive than many other compiled languages, the library is feature-rich and fairly tidy, and for me it's been a joy to use.

Re: D Programming Language

#77

Post by vaylian »

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?

My (somewhat outdated) experience is that D feels like a better and more elegant C++. Rust certainly has been influenced by C and C++, but it also took a lot of inspiration from the ML-family of languages and it has a much stronger type system as a consequence.

Re: D Programming Language

#78

Post by skocznymroczny »

badsectoracula wrote: post #75
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)?

One feature of D that i really wish other languages would adopt (not sure about Rust but i also think it lacks it, though if it has it to a similar extent as D it might be the reason i check it again more seriously) is the metaprogramming and compile-time code evaluation features it has (IIRC you can use most of the language during compile time as it runs in a bytecode VM), down to even having functions that generate…

Arguably, most of the metaprogramming in D is done with templates and it comes with all the flaws of templates in C++. The error messages are long and it's hard to decipher what exactly went wrong (static asserts help a lot for this, when they actually exist). IDE support is non-existent after a certain point because IDE can't reason about code that doesn't exist yet. And code gets less self-documenting because it's all Output(T,U) foo(T, U)(T t, U u) and even the official samples use auto everywhere because it's hard to get the actual output types.

Re: D Programming Language

#79

Post by einr »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #65
einr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Good tooling, good libraries, proven track record" are all relative concepts, it's not something you have or don't have.

There are serious projects being written in D as we speak, I'm sure, and the language has a track record of having been consistently maintained and improved since 2001, and has some very good libraries and tooling (very nice standard library, three independent and supported compiler implementations!) It does not have good libraries and tooling for all things; certainly integrations with other libs and systems often lag behind more popular languages, but no programming language is suitable for everything.

What I'm saying is there's a big world out there, not all programmers are burdened with having to care about CV-maxxing, community or the preferences of other devs, some of them can just do things in the language they prefer. And therefore, not everything benefits from being written in Rust or whatever the top #1 Most Popular! Trending! Best Choice for System Programming 2026! programming language of the week happens to be.

Re: D Programming Language

#80

Post by skocznymroczny »

I like D in general, however it is missing out in WASM where other languages like Rust, Zig, even Go are thriving. Official reasoning usually included waiting for GC support from WASM runtime, but other GC languages seem to just ship their own GC and move on.
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