5 ms·

Not sure why you would use C# when you can use Dlang?

by p0nce 6y ago

Kranar 6y ago
To get access to a wealth of libraries, support, documentation and tools, that D is sorely lacking in. To be able to use a state of the art garbage collector that provides some degree of guarantee about runtime performance as opposed to D's very poor garbage collector that provides basically no guarantees and is known to sometimes block an application for upwards of dozens of seconds at a time [1]. And most importantly, to be able to use a platform that has pretty strong guarantees about backwards compatibility and that is able to run code from 10 years ago without modification, as opposed to D where even a minor version update can end up breaking D's own standard library. Certainly D has a niche of users who are very passionate about it and for those guys, all the power to you guys and don't bother listening to me... but for most of us, well after 20 years it really hasn't established itself as a reliable language to use beyond that niche. It's no longer 2005, a time when C++ was stagnating and there was a lot of opportunity for a new programming language to sit some where between Java and C. Instead of being released with a roadmap, some promising libraries and frameworks that establish a clear use case where D could shine, and a license that allowed broader community involvement in the implementation of the language and its standard library, it was released as a proprietary compiler that ended up quickly resulting a very fragmented community with a lot of infighting, many missteps and mismanagement made on the part of D's leadership the result of which is that D lost on the order of 5-10 years worth of progress for nothing. It's now 2021, C++ has advanced significantly since those days, there's many new languages such as Go and Rust that have taken the steam out of D and are progressing far more rapidly... and D, which at one point in time was actually innovating on language design, is now constantly trying to play catch up with other languages and implementing half-assed features. The language is often referred to as a kitchen sink of functionality and I kid you not when I say D is literally in the process of working on adding a quasi-borrow checker to the language just so it can keep up with Rust. [1] https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector-problem/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector...
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > To get access to a wealth of libraries, support, documentation and tools, that D is sorely lacking in. Libraries have never been an issue for me. You get all C libraries trivially, so to the extent that C has libraries, so does D. I also embed R inside my D programs, so I get access to every R library. And if you want to object that "R is slow", I'm not talking about only calling R, I'm also talking about calling R bindings to C++ libraries without having to involve R. I suppose there would be some marginal benefits to having everything written in D, but many people seem more than happy to use languages like Python that access functions written in other languages. > And most importantly, to be able to use a platform that has pretty strong guarantees about backwards compatibility and that is able to run code from 10 years ago without modification, as opposed to D where even a minor version update can end up breaking D's own standard library. Breaking changes are not that frequent. You're right, though, if you have a zero-tolerance policy with respect to breaking changes, you can't use D or any other language that has breaking changes. > it was released as a proprietary compiler that ended up quickly resulting a very fragmented community with a lot of infighting, many missteps and mismanagement made on the part of D's leadership the result of which is that D lost on the order of 5-10 years worth of progress for nothing. You're referring to things that happened before the pyramids of Egypt were built. Why would someone that has no interest in the language spend time writing comments about ancient, ancient history on Hacker News?
  - ku-man 6y ago
    "You're referring to things that happened before the pyramids of Egypt were built. Why would someone that has no interest in the language spend time writing comments about ancient, ancient history on Hacker News?" If the D leadership didn't made that, according to you, very old, hence trivial mistake, all the man-power and support that Rust is currently enjoying would be spent on D.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  > I kid you not when I say D is literally in the process of working on adding a quasi-borrow checker It is a borrow-checker, and it's a good idea, if you disagree go and write C
skocznymroczny 6y ago
As a D user... An IDE that works amazingly well, autocompletes everything and can refactor everything across many files (D will never get there because it makes heavy use of code generation). A much more stable and battletested compiler and a surrounding ecosystem. Wealth of libraries for each task, from game to web development. A lot of work opportunities in C#, not as many in D. Because of popularity, it's easier to attract other developers to your project.

Not sure why you would use C# when you can use Dlang?

by p0nce 6y ago

Not sure why you would use C# when you can use Dlang?

To get access to a wealth of libraries, support, documentation and tools, that D is sorely lacking in. To be able to use a state of the art garbage collector that provides some degree of guarantee about runtime performance as opposed to D's very poor garbage collector that provides basically no guarantees and is known to sometimes block an application for upwards of dozens of seconds at a time [1]. And most importantly, to be able to use a platform that has pretty strong guarantees about backwards compatibility and that is able to run code from 10 years ago without modification, as opposed to D where even a minor version update can end up breaking D's own standard library. Certainly D has a niche of users who are very passionate about it and for those guys, all the power to you guys and don't bother listening to me... but for most of us, well after 20 years it really hasn't established itself as a reliable language to use beyond that niche. It's no longer 2005, a time when C++ was stagnating and there was a lot of opportunity for a new programming language to sit some where between Java and C. Instead of being released with a roadmap, some promising libraries and frameworks that establish a clear use case where D could shine, and a license that allowed broader community involvement in the implementation of the language and its standard library, it was released as a proprietary compiler that ended up quickly resulting a very fragmented community with a lot of infighting, many missteps and mismanagement made on the part of D's leadership the result of which is that D lost on the order of 5-10 years worth of progress for nothing. It's now 2021, C++ has advanced significantly since those days, there's many new languages such as Go and Rust that have taken the steam out of D and are progressing far more rapidly... and D, which at one point in time was actually innovating on language design, is now constantly trying to play catch up with other languages and implementing half-assed features. The language is often referred to as a kitchen sink of functionality and I kid you not when I say D is literally in the process of working on adding a quasi-borrow checker to the language just so it can keep up with Rust. [1] https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector-problem/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2014/09/09/ds-garbage-collector...

bachmeier 6y ago
> To get access to a wealth of libraries, support, documentation and tools, that D is sorely lacking in. Libraries have never been an issue for me. You get all C libraries trivially, so to the extent that C has libraries, so does D. I also embed R inside my D programs, so I get access to every R library. And if you want to object that "R is slow", I'm not talking about only calling R, I'm also talking about calling R bindings to C++ libraries without having to involve R. I suppose there would be some marginal benefits to having everything written in D, but many people seem more than happy to use languages like Python that access functions written in other languages. > And most importantly, to be able to use a platform that has pretty strong guarantees about backwards compatibility and that is able to run code from 10 years ago without modification, as opposed to D where even a minor version update can end up breaking D's own standard library. Breaking changes are not that frequent. You're right, though, if you have a zero-tolerance policy with respect to breaking changes, you can't use D or any other language that has breaking changes. > it was released as a proprietary compiler that ended up quickly resulting a very fragmented community with a lot of infighting, many missteps and mismanagement made on the part of D's leadership the result of which is that D lost on the order of 5-10 years worth of progress for nothing. You're referring to things that happened before the pyramids of Egypt were built. Why would someone that has no interest in the language spend time writing comments about ancient, ancient history on Hacker News?
- ku-man 6y ago
  "You're referring to things that happened before the pyramids of Egypt were built. Why would someone that has no interest in the language spend time writing comments about ancient, ancient history on Hacker News?" If the D leadership didn't made that, according to you, very old, hence trivial mistake, all the man-power and support that Rust is currently enjoying would be spent on D.
mhh__ 6y ago
> I kid you not when I say D is literally in the process of working on adding a quasi-borrow checker It is a borrow-checker, and it's a good idea, if you disagree go and write C

skocznymroczny 6y ago

As a D user... An IDE that works amazingly well, autocompletes everything and can refactor everything across many files (D will never get there because it makes heavy use of code generation). A much more stable and battletested compiler and a surrounding ecosystem. Wealth of libraries for each task, from game to web development. A lot of work opportunities in C#, not as many in D. Because of popularity, it's easier to attract other developers to your project.