5 ms·

Sell me on using D, I have no skin in the game, just curious of what fans of D say.

jadbox 7y ago
It was one of the easiest languages for me to learn, and I felt I was as productive in it as Py/Node (that I've used for years) with only about 2 weeks of playing with D on the side. There's a lot of intuitional things that D gets very right imho, from syntax to the standard lib. Also the generic/template support in D is a real pleasure to work with coming from most other languages I've used. There's a couple challenges though. D's community for library support isn't as rich when comparing to even newer languages like Go. The other issue is D's runtime gc (which is being slowly removed/reduced) is pretty slow compared to Go, and is similar to Python in performance. The shame is, on paper, D could replace Py or Node for being a very developer productive language. However, it can't compete with them because it doesn't have the same massive community. It also isn't performant enough to stand out against Go and Rust. So D is sitting in an uncanny valley without a silver bullet to stand out against any one particular audience. In many ways, D reminds me of Plan9. For me personally, it's one of my favorite languages to program in (it "gives me joy"), but I currently only use it for side projects. My hope is in these active projects: a) D minimizes gc use and makes the gc as fast as Go's, allowing it to complete in the performance [web app] category. Vibe.d performance competing fairly in the top of techempower benchmarks. b) Rust adds more sugar to improve developer 'ergonomics' and finishes the async additions. c) Go gets "D like" generics and macros (Shh... I can dream)
- nicwilson 7y ago
  Re GC, it is most definitely not being removed. Dependance on it is being reduced (with @nogc) and if you don't allocate from it, it will never trigger. It was recently made multithreaded for the mark phase (sweep is still single threaded), which for large heap small garbage has made it significantly faster. There are also fork-based GC's available for linux where the mark and sweep are done by a separate process. The GC is stop the world so if you care about latency the default is not so great, but there are plenty of groups using D for hard realtime systems with either no use of the GC or the fork based one. Speed wise the default is not too bad.
systems 7y ago
D have one thing going for it, it has Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu Other than that, not so much D is a language with no clear strategic advantage D is language that doesn't have enough high level features to make it a top choice for application development And is not low level enough to be a top choice for systems programming D's failure is at a strategic level, it wont be solved by adding new features or even removing features
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Actually I think D would be helped by removing features and focusing on really refining the existing stuff, especially CTFE which I think is the real selling point of D.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
    > CTFE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compile_time_function_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compile_time_function_executio...
  - skocznymroczny 7y ago
    What kind of features do you think should be removed? There were some people on the forums that were in favor of removing any feature that could be reimplemented with templates as a library solution.
    - faissaloo 7y ago
      Optional parentheses, UFCS, BetterC, named character entities and the objective-C & C++ interfaces to name a few.
      - mhh__ 7y ago
        Removing the C++ interfaces? This would completely break a decent chunk of the compilers of D, no? betterC, UFCS are both opt in so what's the rationale for breaking a huge amount of library code?
shakna 7y ago
I'm not a fan of relying only on any single language, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but D comes with a lot that some people wouldn't expect. It covers a lot of low-level and high-level concepts, and has a decent package manager attached to the ecosystem. (dub). Which means you can magically do things like: #!/usr/bin/env dub /+ dub.sdl: dependency "vibe-d" version="~>0.8.0" +/ void main() { import vibe.d; listenHTTP(":8080", (req, res) { res.writeBody("Hello, World: " ~ req.path); }); runApplication(); } Whilst at the same time D also supports a 'betterC' flag so that transferring your low-level code to a language with higher-level support and higher levels of safety is fairly easy. It has generics, compile-time evaluation, a great FFI story, and a fairly decent ecosystem of packages out there for you to play with. It has threading and multiprocessing and... So on.
monetus 7y ago
I've not fallen down the D rabbit hole entirely, more focused on nim, but both of them can consume and spit out C APIs like nobody's business. See some great C lib you don't want to hack on, but do want to utilize? D should work well. Want to offer your library to the wider family of C-like languages? D can do it. Walter bright and co. having designed the compiler so well sometimes makes you feel like your running a interpreter instead, so iterating on your code is comfortable as well.

It was one of the easiest languages for me to learn, and I felt I was as productive in it as Py/Node (that I've used for years) with only about 2 weeks of playing with D on the side. There's a lot of intuitional things that D gets very right imho, from syntax to the standard lib. Also the generic/template support in D is a real pleasure to work with coming from most other languages I've used. There's a couple challenges though. D's community for library support isn't as rich when comparing to even newer languages like Go. The other issue is D's runtime gc (which is being slowly removed/reduced) is pretty slow compared to Go, and is similar to Python in performance. The shame is, on paper, D could replace Py or Node for being a very developer productive language. However, it can't compete with them because it doesn't have the same massive community. It also isn't performant enough to stand out against Go and Rust. So D is sitting in an uncanny valley without a silver bullet to stand out against any one particular audience. In many ways, D reminds me of Plan9. For me personally, it's one of my favorite languages to program in (it "gives me joy"), but I currently only use it for side projects. My hope is in these active projects: a) D minimizes gc use and makes the gc as fast as Go's, allowing it to complete in the performance [web app] category. Vibe.d performance competing fairly in the top of techempower benchmarks. b) Rust adds more sugar to improve developer 'ergonomics' and finishes the async additions. c) Go gets "D like" generics and macros (Shh... I can dream)

nicwilson 7y ago
Re GC, it is most definitely not being removed. Dependance on it is being reduced (with @nogc) and if you don't allocate from it, it will never trigger. It was recently made multithreaded for the mark phase (sweep is still single threaded), which for large heap small garbage has made it significantly faster. There are also fork-based GC's available for linux where the mark and sweep are done by a separate process. The GC is stop the world so if you care about latency the default is not so great, but there are plenty of groups using D for hard realtime systems with either no use of the GC or the fork based one. Speed wise the default is not too bad.

systems 7y ago

D have one thing going for it, it has Walter Bright and Andrei Alexandrescu Other than that, not so much D is a language with no clear strategic advantage D is language that doesn't have enough high level features to make it a top choice for application development And is not low level enough to be a top choice for systems programming D's failure is at a strategic level, it wont be solved by adding new features or even removing features

faissaloo 7y ago
Actually I think D would be helped by removing features and focusing on really refining the existing stuff, especially CTFE which I think is the real selling point of D.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
  > CTFE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compile_time_function_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compile_time_function_executio...
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  What kind of features do you think should be removed? There were some people on the forums that were in favor of removing any feature that could be reimplemented with templates as a library solution.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    Optional parentheses, UFCS, BetterC, named character entities and the objective-C & C++ interfaces to name a few.
    - mhh__ 7y ago
      Removing the C++ interfaces? This would completely break a decent chunk of the compilers of D, no? betterC, UFCS are both opt in so what's the rationale for breaking a huge amount of library code?

shakna 7y ago

I'm not a fan of relying only on any single language, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but D comes with a lot that some people wouldn't expect. It covers a lot of low-level and high-level concepts, and has a decent package manager attached to the ecosystem. (dub). Which means you can magically do things like: #!/usr/bin/env dub /+ dub.sdl: dependency "vibe-d" version="~>0.8.0" +/ void main() { import vibe.d; listenHTTP(":8080", (req, res) { res.writeBody("Hello, World: " ~ req.path); }); runApplication(); } Whilst at the same time D also supports a 'betterC' flag so that transferring your low-level code to a language with higher-level support and higher levels of safety is fairly easy. It has generics, compile-time evaluation, a great FFI story, and a fairly decent ecosystem of packages out there for you to play with. It has threading and multiprocessing and... So on.

monetus 7y ago

I've not fallen down the D rabbit hole entirely, more focused on nim, but both of them can consume and spit out C APIs like nobody's business. See some great C lib you don't want to hack on, but do want to utilize? D should work well. Want to offer your library to the wider family of C-like languages? D can do it. Walter bright and co. having designed the compiler so well sometimes makes you feel like your running a interpreter instead, so iterating on your code is comfortable as well.