

The Case for D - kungfudoi
http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/217801225

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biohacker42
D is dandy but lacks documentation and tools.

It's a chicken and egg problem, why would you build tools for a language
that's not popular, how will a language become popular without tools.

C++ answered that question by usurping C... or did C backward compatibility
poison C++ ...

Python did it by being fun and easy and having great tools and great
documentation.

D is not ready yet.

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stevejohnson
I want to like D, but the documentation just isn't there. Good tutorials for
it are hard to find, and the OS X installation instructions on the web site
are just plain wrong.

If they could just get together some decent documentation, I would be using D
in a snap.

(Correction: The instructions were wrong when I tried to install D about two
months ago. It took a trip to the mailing list to sort out.)

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grandalf
i've wanted to play with D for a while but didn't want to learn a new
compiler... fortunately I just discovered gdc...

here's a D intro for anyone too lazy to google:

<http://www.digitalmars.com/d/>

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lhorie
I like D as a language to learn more about lower-level domains. It tends to be
(imho) easier to read than C code and there are lots of interesting projects
going on over at dsource.org

Some people seem to dislike the fact that there are the two standard
libraries, but I think that just adds to making the learning curve less steep
(i.e. you can choose whether you want a closer-to-the-metal or a more high
level flavour of the language). Reading code written in different standard
libraries in itself can also be quite illuminating.

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bensummers
As a recovering C++ programmer, this sounds exceedingly shiny. The concurrency
by design is pretty neat.

However, the author does talk about the usual bias of such articles. I wonder
if he's similarly biased?

But D is now on the list of things to try out on a rainy day.

~~~
Erwin
Well, the author of this article is Andrei Alexandrescu. If you were a serious
user of the C++ language you've probably read his "Modern C++ Design" and
other stuff he's written -- so he has as deep knowledge of C++ and its stdlib
as you can get, thus I judge his enthusiasm for D as in a way higher class
compare to a a blog entry by someone who has just found Haskell/Erlang/or
similar (but still somewhat theorethical).

D2 certainly sounds refreshingly simple. Having said that I don't fancy
rewriting 125 KLOC of Python in even D. My performance critical code uses
Cython. I'll have to try to use e.g. PyD (or some newer replacement) to write
some code in D to interface with.

In a typical WEB app however there's usually not much stuff you can say: hey,
this is totally independent CPU-bound code running for a significant amount of
time on a limited set of data that can be written in a lower-level language.

(Oh, I suddenly feel so dirty for upgrading a server from 16 to 32 gigabyte to
allow for bloated Python data structures!)

