D Programming Language

Post by atilaneves » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

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.…

Post by fooker » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:44 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #119

fooker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a somewhat simplistic view of ownership and borrowing for modern programming languages. Pointers are not the only 'pointer's to resources. You can have handles specific to your codebase or system, you can have indices to objects in some flat array that the rest of your codebase uses, even temporary file names. An object oriented (or 'multi paradigm') language has to account for these and not just literal poin…

How does Rust (or C++) treat array indices as resources? And won't that defy the reason to use indices over pointers?

  struct resource {
    resource(ctx *c, ...) {index = c->store(...); ...;}
    size_t index;
    ctx *c;
    ~resource() {c->free(index);}
    // copy constructor+op creates new handle
    // move constructor+op copies the handle, maybe zeroes the current one 
  };

Post by arcadia_leak » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

ceteia wrote: post #182

atilaneves wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can just write D. It'll have the same performance as C, if you write C-like code. It might have better performance than C if you use templates (just like in C++).

But why then did arcadia_leak imply as far as I understood him that C is needed for performance in D? But D is not included in the benchmarks game at debian.net, which isn't fair to D either as far as I can tell.

Post by igouy » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

ceteia wrote: post #178

gavinray wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dplug is a framework for building audio plugins that do realtime signal processing, and its creator has produced several well-sold plugins under the "Auburn Sounds" studio name. https://github.com/AuburnSounds/Dplug

Interesting. That might fit the bill, though I am not completely sure. Do you happen to know why D has not been accepted into the benchmarks games at debian.net? I heard that D developers contributed D code, but that D was never accepted.

Post by chainingsolid » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

atilaneves wrote: post #181

optionalsquid wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> and lose access to most things What "most things" are these?