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I ended up playing around with D for a bit before moving to Rust and here were my thoughts Pros 1. It felt very practical. 2. Handling packages using Dub was

I ended up playing around with D for a bit before moving to Rust and here were my thoughts Pros 1. It felt very practical. 2. Handling packages using Dub was great 3. The D programming book by Ali Çehreli was a great introduction http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html 4. A lot of criticism around D were outdated. Whenever you search stuff about D you still find people talking about the split, disabling the GC invalidating over half the std lib (this has changed a lot) etc, from years ago and a lot has changed since then 5. The forum is very helpful, and I was able to get my issues fixed without anyone telling me to RTFM or being mean 6. It's about 20 Years old and has some very mature libs (like the gtkD lib) 7. Running D code like a script with RDMD was great for rapidly learning D 8. I think having 3 separate compilers is great! DMD, GDC and LDC2 all have their pros and cons Cons 1. I found the documentation very difficult to grok. I found it more difficult to understand than Racket's or Rust's 2. It feels like lot of the momentum of D is gone, and has been replaced by rust, zig, etc 3. Lack of examples, lack of questions and answers that aren't from 10 years ago 4. Not a lot of intro materials for people who aren't C/C++ programmers Overall I liked it. Due to a variety of personal reasons I moved on, but if things don't work out with Rust I might be back. I really don't want to try to learn C++ again, I just don't enjoy it.

crazypython 6y ago
> 5. The forum is very helpful, and I was able to get my issues fixed without anyone telling me to RTFM or being mean D forum is one of the most gracious and nice. There is a lot of gratitude.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  They also really know their stuff. I suppose that's an advantage of all less mainstream languages and tools, but D's community is particularly impressive. Another way of putting it: in the C++ community, the average person on a forum is never going to have a seat on the C++ standards commitee. They'll never even get close. With a smaller community like with D, you can find forum threads where the forum regulars are discussing the future of the language, and the discussion really has weight on D's evolution.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Also keep in mind that that pretty small community is able to do what we've done already, e.g. D can pretty much catch C++ exceptions!
Shorel 6y ago
About cons #2. Yep, I feel its momentum has been replaced by Rust for some things and Golang for other things. But zig? No one uses zig for anything serious.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > its momentum has been replaced by Rust for some things and Golang for other things People told me the same thing about Go when I started using D back in 2013. Compared to today, D didn't have a lot going on in 2013.
- e12e 6y ago
  > But zig? No one uses zig for anything serious. I had the impression zig's corporate sponsor (pex.com) uses zig?
- dralley 6y ago
  >But zig? No one uses zig for anything serious. There's at least one company using zig for embedded software, despite its pre-release status, because it's just so much easier to work with than C. It has a lot of potential. You're not wrong that, at the moment, it's most just potential. But people have noticed, and I think once it does finally stabilize in a year or two, it's going to be a huge for embedded type programming and system libraries that would otherwise be C. The value propositions is pretty huge for those use cases especially.
p0nce 6y ago
> 1. I found the documentation very difficult to grok. > 3. Lack of examples, It helps a lot to open issues on the D bugtracker when you encounter those.
stelonix 6y ago
Recently I got fed up with C++ for good and have no interest in touching it anymore. There's just a sheer amount of complexity and lack of free (as in beer) tooling that has driven me mad these past years until I finally gave up last month. Then I checked D and I wanted to try it, but couldn't get a Rider/IntellliJ (can't recall) plugin to work, so I also marked it as lack of tooling; I also couldn't find many code examples, either on github or in communities which weren't old-ass forums. I finally decided to go back to the sanest language I've used, which is C#. With little effort I could get back to writing code instead of endless yak shaving for simple things. For these kind of projects I'm working, a GC isn't the issue, so that didn't bother me. It feels like asking for modern class-based with c-like-syntax and a good std lib in a language is too much... It's sad that C++ "won" the race being such a cumbersome language with slow compile times and a outdated mindset.
- nix23 6y ago
  You should checkout Go it sounds you have work to be done, and Go was exactly made for that.
  - stelonix 6y ago
    I looked at Go but the lack of generics didn't help, so I ditched it. I'm very excited about it now that they're considering adding it though. Thanks for the tip, I'll check out what changed in the meantime!
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Join our discord and we can help you out if you'd like https://discord.gg/bMZk9Q4 https://discord.gg/bMZk9Q4 There is a lot of D code out there trust me, say what you will about our forum but it is rapid!

crazypython 6y ago

> 5. The forum is very helpful, and I was able to get my issues fixed without anyone telling me to RTFM or being mean D forum is one of the most gracious and nice. There is a lot of gratitude.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
They also really know their stuff. I suppose that's an advantage of all less mainstream languages and tools, but D's community is particularly impressive. Another way of putting it: in the C++ community, the average person on a forum is never going to have a seat on the C++ standards commitee. They'll never even get close. With a smaller community like with D, you can find forum threads where the forum regulars are discussing the future of the language, and the discussion really has weight on D's evolution.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Also keep in mind that that pretty small community is able to do what we've done already, e.g. D can pretty much catch C++ exceptions!

Shorel 6y ago

About cons #2. Yep, I feel its momentum has been replaced by Rust for some things and Golang for other things. But zig? No one uses zig for anything serious.

bachmeier 6y ago
> its momentum has been replaced by Rust for some things and Golang for other things People told me the same thing about Go when I started using D back in 2013. Compared to today, D didn't have a lot going on in 2013.
e12e 6y ago
> But zig? No one uses zig for anything serious. I had the impression zig's corporate sponsor (pex.com) uses zig?
dralley 6y ago
>But zig? No one uses zig for anything serious. There's at least one company using zig for embedded software, despite its pre-release status, because it's just so much easier to work with than C. It has a lot of potential. You're not wrong that, at the moment, it's most just potential. But people have noticed, and I think once it does finally stabilize in a year or two, it's going to be a huge for embedded type programming and system libraries that would otherwise be C. The value propositions is pretty huge for those use cases especially.

p0nce 6y ago

> 1. I found the documentation very difficult to grok. > 3. Lack of examples, It helps a lot to open issues on the D bugtracker when you encounter those.

stelonix 6y ago

Recently I got fed up with C++ for good and have no interest in touching it anymore. There's just a sheer amount of complexity and lack of free (as in beer) tooling that has driven me mad these past years until I finally gave up last month. Then I checked D and I wanted to try it, but couldn't get a Rider/IntellliJ (can't recall) plugin to work, so I also marked it as lack of tooling; I also couldn't find many code examples, either on github or in communities which weren't old-ass forums. I finally decided to go back to the sanest language I've used, which is C#. With little effort I could get back to writing code instead of endless yak shaving for simple things. For these kind of projects I'm working, a GC isn't the issue, so that didn't bother me. It feels like asking for modern class-based with c-like-syntax and a good std lib in a language is too much... It's sad that C++ "won" the race being such a cumbersome language with slow compile times and a outdated mindset.

nix23 6y ago
You should checkout Go it sounds you have work to be done, and Go was exactly made for that.
- stelonix 6y ago
  I looked at Go but the lack of generics didn't help, so I ditched it. I'm very excited about it now that they're considering adding it though. Thanks for the tip, I'll check out what changed in the meantime!
mhh__ 6y ago
Join our discord and we can help you out if you'd like https://discord.gg/bMZk9Q4 https://discord.gg/bMZk9Q4 There is a lot of D code out there trust me, say what you will about our forum but it is rapid!