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D Programming Language

dlang.org

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161–170 of 278 posts

Re: D Programming Language

#161

Post by nicwilson »

ceteia wrote: post #156
arcadia_leak wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather say that the GC is the superpower of the language. It allows you to quickly prototype without focusing too much on performance, but it also allows you to come back to the exact same piece of code and rewrite it using malloc at any time. C# or Java don't have this, nor can they compile C code and seamlessly interoperate with it — but in D, this is effortless. Furthermore, if you dig deeper, you'll find that…

[dead]

Sociomantic (bought by Dunhumby, now defunct IIRC) had a realtime advertisement business built in D.

Weka have a realtime distributed filesystem written in D, used for ML/HPC workloads.

Re: D Programming Language

#162

Post by pjmlp »

amelius wrote: post #106
deng wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? As someone who considered it back then when it actually stood a chance to become the next big thing, from what I remember, the whole ecosystem was just too confusing and simply didn't look stable and reliable enough to build upon long-term. A few examples: * The compiler situation: The official compiler was not yet FOSS and other compilers were not availa…

How many people were working on the core compiler/language at the time versus Rust? This could explain it.

D has always been an handful of people.

Re: D Programming Language

#163

Post by pjmlp »

deng wrote: post #148
pjmlp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except there is, only among GC-haters there is not. People forget there isn't ONE GC, rather several of possible implementations depending on the use case. Java Real-Time GC implementations are quite capable to power weapon targeting systems in the battlefield, where a failure causes the wrong side to die. > Aonix PERC Ultra Virtual Machine supports Lockheed Martin's Java components in Aegis Weapon System aboard guid…

Look, when someone says "There's no thing that could handle A,B,C, and D at the same time", answering "But there's one handling B" is not very convincing. (Also, what's with this stupid "hater" thing, it's garbage collection we're talking about, not war crimes)

It is, because there isn't a single language that is an hammer for all types of nails.

It isn't stupid, it is the reality of how many behave for decades.

Thankfully, that issue has been slowly sorting out throughout generation replacement.

I already enjoy that nowadays we already have reached a point in some platforms where the old ways are nowadays quite constrained to a few scenarios and that's it.

Re: D Programming Language

#164

Post by cardanome »

rafaelmn wrote: post #121
arcadia_leak wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather say that the GC is the superpower of the language. It allows you to quickly prototype without focusing too much on performance, but it also allows you to come back to the exact same piece of code and rewrite it using malloc at any time. C# or Java don't have this, nor can they compile C code and seamlessly interoperate with it — but in D, this is effortless. Furthermore, if you dig deeper, you'll find that…

> C# or Java don't have this, nor can they compile C code and seamlessly interoperate with it — but in D, this is effortless. C# C interop is pretty smooth, Java is a different story. The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point. >Furthermore, if you dig deeper, you'll find that D offers far greater control over its garbage collector than any other high-level language, to the point tha…

> The fact that C# is becoming the GC language in game dev is proving my point.

That is just the Unity effect. Godot adopted C# because they get paid to do so by Microsoft.

C# allows for far lees control over the garbage collection compared to D. The decision to use C# is partly responsible for the bad reputation of Unity games as it causes a lot of stutters when people are not very careful about how to manage the memory.

The creator of the Mono runtime actually calls using C# his Multi-million dollar mistake and instead works on swift bindings for Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo

Re: D Programming Language

#165

Post by pjmlp »

DeathArrow wrote: post #135

Every talk about D here seems to transform into "why D failed?".

Maybe because there were some expectations when "The D Programming Language" was published back in 2010, regarding where D would be 16 years later.

Re: D Programming Language

#166

Post by cardanome »

optionalsquid wrote: post #129
rafaelmn wrote: post #100

IMHO D just missed the mark with the GC in core. It was released in a time where a replacement for C++ was sorely needed, and it tried to position itself as that (obvious from the name). But by including the GC/runtime it went into a category with C# and Java which are much better options if you're fine with shipping a runtime and GC. Eventually Go showed up to crowd out this space even further. Meanwhile in the C/C+…

My (likely unfair) impression of D is that it feels a bit rudderless: It is trying to be too many things to too many people, and as a consequence it doesn't really stand out compared to the languages that commit to a paradigm. Do you want GC? Great! Do not want GC? Well, you can turn it off, and lose access to most things. Do you want a borrow-checker? Great, D does that as well, though less wholeheartedly than Rust.…

> My (likely unfair) impression of D is that it feels a bit rudderless

The more positive phrasing would be that it is a very pragmatic language. And I really like this.

Currently opinionated langues are really in vogue. Yes they are easier to market but I have personally very soured on this approach now that I am a bit older.

There is not one right way to program. It is fun to use on opinionated language until you hit a problem that it doesn't cover very well and suddenly you are in a world of pain. I like languages that give me escape hatches. That allow me to program they way I want to.

Re: D Programming Language

#167

Post by anal_reactor »

deng wrote: post #85
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? As someone who considered it back then when it actually stood a chance to become the next big thing, from what I remember, the whole ecosystem was just too confusing and simply didn't look stable and reliable enough to build upon long-term. A few examples: * The compiler situation: The official compiler was not yet FOSS and other compilers were not availa…

Can you elaborate on the points? I know nothing about D, but I'm just curious about old drama

Re: D Programming Language

#168

Post by cinntaile »

gspr wrote: post #95
cinntaile wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to before, not a lot of carpenters/furniture makers are left. This is due to automation.

> Compared to before, not a lot of carpenters/furniture makers are left. Which is it? Carpenters or furniture makers? Because the two have nothing in common beyond the fact that both professions primarily work with wood. The former has been unaffected by automation – or even might plausibly have more demand due to the overall economic activity caused by automation! The latter certainly has been greatly affected. The…

From the context it was pretty obvious what the original poster meant, as long as you charitably interpret their message. As per the site guidelines.

Re: D Programming Language

#169

Post by cardanome »

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.

D has three high quality compiler implementations. It has been around for ages and is very stable and has a proven track record.

Zig has one implementation and constant breaking changes.

D is the far more pragmatic and safer choice for serious projects.

Not that Zig is a bad choice but to say that a unstable lang in active development like Zig would be a better choice for "serious projects" compared to a very well established but less popular lang shows the insanity of hype driven development.

Re: D Programming Language

#170

Post by dadoum »

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)?

D has much better metaprogramming compared to Rust. That has been one of the only things making me still write a few D programs. You can do compile time type introspection to generate types or functions from other elements without having to create a compiler plug-in parsing Rust and manipulating syntax trees.

Rust has some of the functional programming niceties like algebraic data types and that's something lacking in D.

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