5 ms·

I spent quite a few year on/with it back in the day. There was D1 which was like a better C, and then there was D2 which was like a better C++. Personally I pre

I spent quite a few year on/with it back in the day. There was D1 which was like a better C, and then there was D2 which was like a better C++. Personally I preferred where D1 was going (and Tango instead of Phobos) but even with D2 it really made the day compared to what was out there and to this day still to an extent is. The thing that killed it for me, and I know at least a couple of friends as well (outside of internal politics at a time) was what kills pretty much all exotics once you start using it. Lack of (up-to-date) libraries / bindings and tooling. At the end of the day that's what you do use for most of the work you're doing anyways - libraries. So suddenly you're doing all these bindings and battling tools instead of working on actual problem at hand. This gets tiresome real quick. For some reason, and mostly that being Mozilla, Rust got quite an initial kick to overcome that initial hurdle in haste. We're not going to mention a lot of those libs are stale in Rust world, but at least they're there and that kind of gives you momentum to go forward. Whatever you're trying to do, there's a non-zero chance there's a library or something out there for you in Rust.. and we got there real quick which then encouraged people to proceed. That's just like my opinion, man.. but I think a key part is that first lib bindings hurdle which Rust somehow went over real quick for a critical mass of it; D hasn't. Love the D though lol, and Walter is a 10000x programmer if you ever saw one but it might be time to hang the hat. I can only imagine how a community like Rust or I don't know Zig of those up-and-coming would benefit from his help and insights. He'd probably single-handedly make rust compile 100x faster. One can hope.

steveklabnik 1y ago
I spent time back in the day with D as well, incidentally. I wonder if we crossed paths back then.
- Keyframe 1y ago
  for sure we did, Steve! Sometimes multiple times a day even, hah. Check out ‪@keyframe2 on bsky or @keyframe on the evil platform and let's reconnect.
  - steveklabnik 1y ago
    Ha, that was so long ago I can barely remember a lot of it. I’ll give you a follow!
mamcx 1y ago
Stressing the point, Rust ship very early with formatter, linter, cargo, rustup, and was not that behind in terms of editor support. That is basically table stakes for a new language now.
jadbox 1y ago
I've heard nice things about Zig being a more ergo alternative to Rust, but I haven't seen anyone compare it to D yet. From my brief testing, it seemed like Zig wasn't as ergo as D, but in theory it could evolve to maybe get there. From the outside, it doesn't seem like Zig has made any super major ergo improvements in the last year, but I could be wrong.
- wavemode 1y ago
  I don't know if I would describe Zig as ergonomic per se. It has some nice features, but the main focus is on completely explicit control over low-level details. In its design Zig always chooses explicitness and programmer control over ergonomics. If a language feature requires a lot of compiler magic then it's probably never going to be added.
  - josephg 1y ago
    Yeah I think of Zig as a modern version of C. And Rust and (I think) D like modern versions of C++. Well. Given D's marriage to the GC, maybe its more like Go or C#. I know its petty - I still can't get past how idiotic and frustrating it is that Zig treats unused variables as a compiler error. Its the worst of all worlds: - Its inconvenient (I have to explicitly suppress them in my code with _ = foo) - Once I've suppressed them, I don't get any compiler warnings any more - so ironically, it takes more effort to find and fix them before committing. I end up accidentally committing code with unused variables more than in Rust or C. - And it totally breaks my flow. I like to explore with my hands and run my code as I go. I clean up my code after my tests pass so I can be sure I don't introduce new bugs while refactoring. Zig's handling of unused variables seems like an unforgivably bad design choice to me. Its been raised by the community plenty of times. Why hasn't it been fixed? I can understand if Andrew Kelly doesn't program the same way I do. We all have our idiosyncrasies. But does he seriously not have any smart people around him who he trusts who can talk him out of this design? It seems like a huge pity to me. It otherwise seems like a lovely language.
    - kristoff_it 1y ago
skocznymroczny 1y ago
I liked D1 more than D2 too. D1 felt to me like a native C#, D2 feels to me more like C++ with GC. And I feel like there's been a lot of effort to satisfy C++ programmers, who will never invest into D anyway because they don't like the idea of GC. The ship has sailed, but I think D would get more traction amongst the Java/C# crowd instead of chasing the C++ crowd which is mostly going for Rust now anyway.

steveklabnik 1y ago

I spent time back in the day with D as well, incidentally. I wonder if we crossed paths back then.

Keyframe 1y ago
for sure we did, Steve! Sometimes multiple times a day even, hah. Check out ‪@keyframe2 on bsky or @keyframe on the evil platform and let's reconnect.
- steveklabnik 1y ago
  Ha, that was so long ago I can barely remember a lot of it. I’ll give you a follow!

mamcx 1y ago

Stressing the point, Rust ship very early with formatter, linter, cargo, rustup, and was not that behind in terms of editor support. That is basically table stakes for a new language now.

jadbox 1y ago

I've heard nice things about Zig being a more ergo alternative to Rust, but I haven't seen anyone compare it to D yet. From my brief testing, it seemed like Zig wasn't as ergo as D, but in theory it could evolve to maybe get there. From the outside, it doesn't seem like Zig has made any super major ergo improvements in the last year, but I could be wrong.

wavemode 1y ago
I don't know if I would describe Zig as ergonomic per se. It has some nice features, but the main focus is on completely explicit control over low-level details. In its design Zig always chooses explicitness and programmer control over ergonomics. If a language feature requires a lot of compiler magic then it's probably never going to be added.
- josephg 1y ago
  Yeah I think of Zig as a modern version of C. And Rust and (I think) D like modern versions of C++. Well. Given D's marriage to the GC, maybe its more like Go or C#. I know its petty - I still can't get past how idiotic and frustrating it is that Zig treats unused variables as a compiler error. Its the worst of all worlds: - Its inconvenient (I have to explicitly suppress them in my code with _ = foo) - Once I've suppressed them, I don't get any compiler warnings any more - so ironically, it takes more effort to find and fix them before committing. I end up accidentally committing code with unused variables more than in Rust or C. - And it totally breaks my flow. I like to explore with my hands and run my code as I go. I clean up my code after my tests pass so I can be sure I don't introduce new bugs while refactoring. Zig's handling of unused variables seems like an unforgivably bad design choice to me. Its been raised by the community plenty of times. Why hasn't it been fixed? I can understand if Andrew Kelly doesn't program the same way I do. We all have our idiosyncrasies. But does he seriously not have any smart people around him who he trusts who can talk him out of this design? It seems like a huge pity to me. It otherwise seems like a lovely language.
  - kristoff_it 1y ago

skocznymroczny 1y ago

I liked D1 more than D2 too. D1 felt to me like a native C#, D2 feels to me more like C++ with GC. And I feel like there's been a lot of effort to satisfy C++ programmers, who will never invest into D anyway because they don't like the idea of GC. The ship has sailed, but I think D would get more traction amongst the Java/C# crowd instead of chasing the C++ crowd which is mostly going for Rust now anyway.