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Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

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Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#91

Post by z3phyr »

z3t4 wrote: post #80
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The Rust community is extremely hostile, especially against other languages, and D in particular.

Its not hostile. Its aggressive in selling the strong points of the language. Having said that, I do wish newer languages spring up that adapt the good stuff from Rust. I can never like Rust syntax.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#92

Post by skocznymroczny »

jordigh wrote: post #60
fb03 wrote: post #50

Random Fact: I can't help but smile when I read that D's "STL" is called Phobos because of my Doom 2 nostalgia :) Have a nice day, everyone o/

Well, Walter's company is Digital Mars so that's where he gets his naming scheme from. Nothing to do with Doom except they both are using the same Greco-Roman deity astronomical naming scheme.

Originally D was supposed to be named Mars. The stdlib is named Phobos and there is a project called Deimos which is about providing bindings to C libraries.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#93

Post by grpsisgood »

tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

Because there is no big company behind D. Rust isn't good as boasted. But firefox and HN willing to blow the bubble. That's their company's strategy.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#94

Post by youeseh »

grpsisgood wrote: post #93
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

Because there is no big company behind D. Rust isn't good as boasted. But firefox and HN willing to blow the bubble. That's their company's strategy.

> Rust isn't good as boasted

What do you mean? What's being boasted about Rust and what makes it untrue?

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#95

Post by jdright »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
nonsince wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason the way I see it is that a lot of people who still use C and C++ need maximum speed, and D is only memory-safe with its garbage collector enabled. This affects latency and adds overhead. For many cases using a garbage collector is fine, but D was trying to target video games and other spaces where the GC was not acceptable. So D allows you to turn the GC off, but then it's just a vastly less-mature C+…

On what concerns video games, all major engines do use GC on gameplay code, including variations of C++ GCs.

emphasis on gameplay code. And even there, if you target 60fps (sure a minority of developers), then GC is a liability at best.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#96

Post by faissaloo »

nonsince wrote: post #85
tombert wrote: post #68

I have wondered for awhile now why Rust is getting all this attention of being "Like C but safe and cool!", but no one would mention D. I personally don't do systems programming because I'm not smart enough but the little bit I have done, I found D to be the most-natural feeling (even over Rust), and D has been around a lot longer. I suppose timing is everything for these kinds of things.

The main reason the way I see it is that a lot of people who still use C and C++ need maximum speed, and D is only memory-safe with its garbage collector enabled. This affects latency and adds overhead. For many cases using a garbage collector is fine, but D was trying to target video games and other spaces where the GC was not acceptable. So D allows you to turn the GC off, but then it's just a vastly less-mature C+…

Actually GC can decrease overhead depending on your use of memory since it only frees when memory when it's needed.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#97

Post by faissaloo »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #8

I would have liked to hear more about what exactly made D so great -- reading through it it's kind of vague. He mentions generics and finally getting LLVM support working as a target, and being able to use D at a high and low-level but I don't see anything here that's groundbreaking. Could someone who uses D Hate to be that guy, but if you could compare it with rust that would be double A++ good... I know the targets…

Its reflection capabilities are as powerful aa Java if not more so and you can avoid doing so much at runtime using pure functions and templating.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#98

Post by jacques_chirac »

ileri62 wrote: post #15
StreamBright wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can avoid GC with a non-GC standard library that they actually wrote: https://github.com/weka-io/mecca

Here's the thing though: They wrote a new compiler and a new standard library to make the language work for them. How exactly is that good publicity for D? D itself looked and still looks very interesting to me, as it can be very performant, without having insanely ugly syntax such as c++ or rust (inb4 rUsT iS VeRy ReADaBlE).

Most high-performance shops (Google, FB, Netflix, Amazon, ...) tweak their OS, compiler, etc.

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#99

Post by yvdriess »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
yvdriess wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

D feels much more like a 'sane' C successor, dropped from a parallel dimension where C++ could evolve without caring much about breaking its legacy code running the world. It has a few warts, some D v1 leftovers, but overall feels much more coherent than modern C++; even as the latter has grown much closer to D by piling more on top of its templating system. What I personally found the stand out feature of D to be, i…

If I may be blunt, I could hardly believe SFINAE was a feature, and hated implementing it. But one thing I liked about C++ was the partial ordering scheme for template selection. I liked it so much D uses it for both templates and function overload selection (as opposed to the multi-level argument matching scheme C++ uses). Once I figured it out, I thought it was a beauty.

Thank you for keeping a unified dispatch/selection algorithm in D! I feel that in language design, simplifying/streamlining the programmer's mental model is often undervalued compared to "but you would expect X to happen in this situation". Case in point, operator precedence hierarchy compared to uniform application a la Lisp and Smalltalk. I personally gladly accept some up-front weirdness if it gives me long-term uniformity.

PS. I also had a pleasant time when I finally grokked Lisp's CLOS generic method partial ordering. It even gives you the ordering on demand as part of the meta-object protocol: https://clisp.sourceforge.io/impnotes/mop-gf.html#gf-argumen...

Re: Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System

#100

Post by monocasa »

faissaloo wrote: post #96
nonsince wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason the way I see it is that a lot of people who still use C and C++ need maximum speed, and D is only memory-safe with its garbage collector enabled. This affects latency and adds overhead. For many cases using a garbage collector is fine, but D was trying to target video games and other spaces where the GC was not acceptable. So D allows you to turn the GC off, but then it's just a vastly less-mature C+…

Actually GC can decrease overhead depending on your use of memory since it only frees when memory when it's needed.

"Overhead" is a term with many definitions.

Non-conservative GCs use a lot of extra metadata to be able to figure out what's a pointer and what isn't. Conserative GCs leak.

In both cases GCs cut into worse case latency.

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