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The reference D compiler is now open source

forum.dlang.org

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Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#221

Post by milesrout »

oblio wrote: post #137
iamNumber4 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not going to start a flame war. Everyone has their opinions, However there are languages that come and go, and then are swift to become popular, but then are left to rust, because people stopped having smalltalk about them.

Despite the puns, as long as people start building production systems with those languages, they're going to stick around. And several of those languages are probably used by 10x or more people than D is. Luckily, there are so many things to build and so many programmers out there that almost any languages gets a spot under the sun these days. When was the last time a programming language died out? My guess the last…

Coffeescript is essentially dead, many production web sites were written in it.

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#223

Post by WalterBright »

mochomocha wrote: post #194
vram22 wrote: post #147

Good to hear the news, and congrats to all involved. Since I see some comments in this thread, asking what D can be used for, or why people should use D, I'm putting below, an Ask HN thread that I had started some months ago. It got some interesting replies: Ask HN: What are you using D (language) for? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193828

Too late to the party to add my answer to your AskHN, but here we go: I use D at Netflix for machine learning backend.

Please consider adding to http://dlang.org/orgs-using-d.html

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#224

Post by ASalazarMX »

iamNumber4 wrote: post #105

Good news indeed. Switched to D 4 years ago, and have never looked back. I wager that you can sit down a C++/Java/C# veteran, and say write some D code. Here's the manual, have fun. They will with in a few hours be comfortable with the language, and be fairly competent D programmer. Very little FUD surrounding the switching to yet another language with D. D's only issue is that it does not have general adoption, whic…

I think you answered yourself why D is not more popular with the "cool kids". C++/Java/C# are overengineered, verbose, horrible languages to use. Java is a bastard of C++, and C# is the better looking bastard.

Yes we use them, and even like them in a weird Stockholm Syndrome way, but they're not fun to work with. We use them because we need them, not because we enjoy them.

Disclaimer: the personal pronoun "we" as used here means the author plus zero or more people.

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#225

Post by jnordwick »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #224
iamNumber4 wrote: post #105

Good news indeed. Switched to D 4 years ago, and have never looked back. I wager that you can sit down a C++/Java/C# veteran, and say write some D code. Here's the manual, have fun. They will with in a few hours be comfortable with the language, and be fairly competent D programmer. Very little FUD surrounding the switching to yet another language with D. D's only issue is that it does not have general adoption, whic…

I think you answered yourself why D is not more popular with the "cool kids". C++/Java/C# are overengineered, verbose, horrible languages to use. Java is a bastard of C++, and C# is the better looking bastard. Yes we use them, and even like them in a weird Stockholm Syndrome way, but they're not fun to work with. We use them because we need them, not because we enjoy them. Disclaimer: the personal pronoun "we" as use…

Java is very simple and has, hands down, the best tooling of any major language out today. That is why it is the most popular.

Java isn't my favorite language, but even I can remove my blinders enough to see its strengths.

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#226

Post by jononor »

milesrout wrote: post #221
oblio wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the puns, as long as people start building production systems with those languages, they're going to stick around. And several of those languages are probably used by 10x or more people than D is. Luckily, there are so many things to build and so many programmers out there that almost any languages gets a spot under the sun these days. When was the last time a programming language died out? My guess the last…

Coffeescript is essentially dead, many production web sites were written in it.

For what definition of dead? Sure, not so many use it for new projects, but it is still being maintained. There is an upcoming major release which will output ES2015.

I've got some tens of libraries/apps written in CS, no plans to migrate them. Works as well today as it did 3 years ago.

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#228

Post by eco »

milesrout wrote: post #220
lomnakkus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that "it's going to stay", as you say, but at the very least it's been hugely influential on C++ (if constexpr, anyone?) and even for just that it is and has been valuable for everyone working in C++ land.

If constexpr is not inspired by static if. In fact, proposals of static if and things like it were explicitly rejected by the committee.

Walter, Andrei, and Herb proposed "static if" in N3329 (after it's big success in D) which was ultimately rejected. Ville Voutilainen explicitly revived it in N4461 with changes. Ville then iterated on that proposal a few times (P0128R0 and P0128R1). Finally, Jens Maurer took that and made some syntax changes with commitee input resulting in P0292R1 which was the accepted proposal. "static if" from D absolutely was the inspiration for "constexpr if". Each proposal references the last in a chain going back to Walter, Andrei, and Herb's proposal.

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#229

Post by throwaway7645 »

jacquesm wrote: post #187
lomnakkus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paraphrase: On a long-enough timescale all languages are fads. The ultimate power that can actually be manifested in physical reality (as far as we know) is still Turing Machines[1]... the rest is mostly ergonomics. [1] Well, QM may add a "little bit" of efficiency, but it doesn't add any oracular power, per se. AFAIUI, at least.

FORTRAN users beg to differ. The horse they backed will be here until the lights go out because it probably is used to power the lights at some level.

Yes it most certainly is. All the power system applications written in the 60's and 70's were done so in Fortran as they had to be fast and run numerical analysis on massive matrices. However, a lot of it is being rewritten in more modern languages like C++ or C depending on the application.

Re: The reference D compiler is now open source

#230

Post by klickverbot »

steveklabnik wrote: post #119
deaddodo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you plan to learn a systems language for systems reasons (embedded development, compilers, low-level interfaces, etc) then Rust is the pick. No GC and the option to have no runtime (or a very small one, by default). In other words, if you're looking to replace/supplement your C use: go Rust. If you're looking to replace/supplement your C++ use: probably go D, with some caveats towards actual use. Note: I like both…

> (or a very small one, by default). Some details here... every language other than assembly languages has some amount of runtime. This is Rust's: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/rt.... (as you allude to, many people refer to this amount of runtime as "no runtime" since it's very, very small.) You could also consider some other things as part of a runtime; for example, by default on most plat…

Do you depend on the C runtime as well?
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