4 ms·

What about -betterC? I always thought this was a nice "pivot" for D. It would be great to have more support for this direction. You can't avoid malloc there, bu

by mhd 7y ago

What about -betterC? I always thought this was a nice "pivot" for D. It would be great to have more support for this direction. You can't avoid malloc there, but maybe some instrumenting for leak detection or some libc replacements that exploit or are exploited by the language. Other than that, I'm okay with anything that was already in Eiffel or Modula-3…

skocznymroczny 7y ago
BetterC was created at first to make it easier to port D compiler from C to D. Then people realized that it might be interesting to have D without GC and without runtime, because it makes it trivial to port to other platforms such as embedded, mobile or WASM. The problem is, betterC is kind of in that awkward spot. It's not comparable to the "real" D, and if you can live with betterC, you might as well just use C and enjoy the wide C ecosystem.
- grok2 7y ago
  But as a language doesn't betterC provides lots more useful features than C (the module system, meta-programming (imagine C with generics), scope() and many other useful things) that make it really a better language than C while still keeping C interop. I agree that it is in an awkward spot though -- and would have benefited from being it's own separate programming language. It would have been a killer feature if it could also compile standard C at the same time!
  - grok2 7y ago
    It would have been a killer feature if in betterC mode it could compile standard C programs and be a drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang :-).
    - renox 7y ago
      Zig is doing this, an interesting feature.
    - 1980phipsi 7y ago
      You might find Atila's project dpp interesting: https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp
- mhh__ 7y ago
  > if you can live with betterC, you might as well just use C and enjoy the wide C ecosystem. If you can be bothered to use betterC then that's probably not true. To be argumentative, C is fucking horrible. BetterC still gives you a decent chunk of D's features - templates alone make it worth the switch. No more macro spam for example. Can you imagine how much boilerplate you'd have to write to mimic this: https://d.godbolt.org/z/3XNBFW https://d.godbolt.org/z/3XNBFW
  - skocznymroczny 7y ago
    I wish betterC had associative arrays :(
- ttkciar 7y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you say :-) but it bears pointing out that D already lets you call into C libraries without glue. This means you can write C and use the entire wide C ecosystem, but use D for the parts of the program which make sense in D, painlessly.

by mhd 7y ago

skocznymroczny 7y ago

BetterC was created at first to make it easier to port D compiler from C to D. Then people realized that it might be interesting to have D without GC and without runtime, because it makes it trivial to port to other platforms such as embedded, mobile or WASM. The problem is, betterC is kind of in that awkward spot. It's not comparable to the "real" D, and if you can live with betterC, you might as well just use C and enjoy the wide C ecosystem.

grok2 7y ago
But as a language doesn't betterC provides lots more useful features than C (the module system, meta-programming (imagine C with generics), scope() and many other useful things) that make it really a better language than C while still keeping C interop. I agree that it is in an awkward spot though -- and would have benefited from being it's own separate programming language. It would have been a killer feature if it could also compile standard C at the same time!
- grok2 7y ago
  It would have been a killer feature if in betterC mode it could compile standard C programs and be a drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang :-).
  - renox 7y ago
    Zig is doing this, an interesting feature.
  - 1980phipsi 7y ago
    You might find Atila's project dpp interesting: https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp
mhh__ 7y ago
> if you can live with betterC, you might as well just use C and enjoy the wide C ecosystem. If you can be bothered to use betterC then that's probably not true. To be argumentative, C is fucking horrible. BetterC still gives you a decent chunk of D's features - templates alone make it worth the switch. No more macro spam for example. Can you imagine how much boilerplate you'd have to write to mimic this: https://d.godbolt.org/z/3XNBFW https://d.godbolt.org/z/3XNBFW
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  I wish betterC had associative arrays :(
ttkciar 7y ago
I don't disagree with anything you say :-) but it bears pointing out that D already lets you call into C libraries without glue. This means you can write C and use the entire wide C ecosystem, but use D for the parts of the program which make sense in D, painlessly.