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Is anyone using D? Is it a lot better than C++ or just a little?

• signa11 18y ago
  well, i played around with it for sometime. it is pretty good e.g i really like the new (and much improved!) template mechanism especially meta-programming abilities, variadic template arguments, contracts for enforcing class/function invariants, function-literals, dynamic closures etc. the issue that i have (imho ofcourse) is that of 2 incompatible standard libraries phobos and tango, which makes it quite painful to work at anything significant/non-trivial. iirc, there was an effort to have an stl kind of thing for D, not sure how far (or in what state) it is. also, it seems to me (i can be wrong about it) that D is being marketed towards corpo-drones doing win32 (c++) stuff, rather than to linux C devs. most likely, they (corpo-drones) are moving towads C#/.net and i doubt that they are interested...
• old-gregg 18y ago
  There is also an issue with an implementation: the official implementation from Walter is awkwardly packaged and lacks the source (you can't build it yourself). This pretty much turns it into a toy for Linux/OSX programmers: you can't distribute your D code, nobody will figure out how to build it. And GCC-based implementation is lagging behind in features, and also scores consistently 10-30% slower than C/C++ in benchmarks, which kills D's appeal as a performant replacement for C. What Walter needs to do, IMO, is to abandon his own implementation completely and closely work with GCC/Linux community to include high-quality D into standard GCC package. Then we may start seeing decent software written in it.