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Yes, I can see the design of D was made carefully. D is actually a great language. I just "don't understand" why it's not massively used instead of more recent

by kreco 6y ago

Yes, I can see the design of D was made carefully. D is actually a great language. I just "don't understand" why it's not massively used instead of more recent versions of C++, I consider newer version of C++ as a totally different language with more drawbacks than advantages. Half of new features are present to fix previous half baked features. This is quite embarrassing. Sorry for my selection of words (and for the unrelated opinion, I had to rant), I'm not good at spending time to rephrase when the end content is the same. I remember one time I spent the whole day browsing the website of D, everything actually make sense. There are still features that I wouldn't use, but this is what I expect from a programming language design. I was impressed by a lot of decisions. I seemed to remember that I was a bit sad to not find proper performance benchmarks against other languages. I was intrigued because the documentation was so complete, it was just lacking this (maybe I just couldn't find them). It was a long time ago so it has probably been fixed. I will give it a try at some point.

WalterBright 6y ago
The performance of D vs C and C++ should be identical for code written the same way, as they share the same optimizer and code generators. Also, we used to publish benchmarks. These inevitably did not produce illumination, but long ripostes from people arguing that the benchmark was unfair, inaccurate, nobody would write code that way, we sabotaged other languages, etc. We encourage people to run their own benchmarks on their own code and let the results speak for themselves. One issue with moving to D is it takes a while for people to learn "the D way". For example, if they come from C they write C style code in D. From C++, they write C++ style in D. From Python they write Python style in D. Inevitably they'll run into some difference where D doesn't have an analogous feature, and would get a bit frustrated (even though in D the task would be accomplished a different way). It takes a bit of perseverance and faith to get through that until one discovers "the D way" and then they're hooked. One of the reasons for DasBetterC was to reduce this issue as much as possible, though the people who like metaprogramming with the C preprocessor will have more work to do in getting adapted to D's powerful metaprogramming features, which of course work nothing like text macros.
- kreco 6y ago
  > Also, we used to publish benchmarks. These inevitably did not produce illumination, but long ripostes from people arguing that the benchmark was unfair, inaccurate, nobody would write code that way, we sabotaged other languages, etc. Oh, this is pretty sad... Anyway thanks for your time. Was nice to interact with the author of D. I truly believe what you've done will inspire a lot of people. I hope you didn't encounter too many people saying creating D was foolish. I spent time checking about a lot of languages and only D (and Jai, but it's not released) would restore my joy of programming.

by kreco 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

The performance of D vs C and C++ should be identical for code written the same way, as they share the same optimizer and code generators. Also, we used to publish benchmarks. These inevitably did not produce illumination, but long ripostes from people arguing that the benchmark was unfair, inaccurate, nobody would write code that way, we sabotaged other languages, etc. We encourage people to run their own benchmarks on their own code and let the results speak for themselves. One issue with moving to D is it takes a while for people to learn "the D way". For example, if they come from C they write C style code in D. From C++, they write C++ style in D. From Python they write Python style in D. Inevitably they'll run into some difference where D doesn't have an analogous feature, and would get a bit frustrated (even though in D the task would be accomplished a different way). It takes a bit of perseverance and faith to get through that until one discovers "the D way" and then they're hooked. One of the reasons for DasBetterC was to reduce this issue as much as possible, though the people who like metaprogramming with the C preprocessor will have more work to do in getting adapted to D's powerful metaprogramming features, which of course work nothing like text macros.

kreco 6y ago
> Also, we used to publish benchmarks. These inevitably did not produce illumination, but long ripostes from people arguing that the benchmark was unfair, inaccurate, nobody would write code that way, we sabotaged other languages, etc. Oh, this is pretty sad... Anyway thanks for your time. Was nice to interact with the author of D. I truly believe what you've done will inspire a lot of people. I hope you didn't encounter too many people saying creating D was foolish. I spent time checking about a lot of languages and only D (and Jai, but it's not released) would restore my joy of programming.