
New D language pumps up programmer productivity - pius
http://www.linux.com/feature/124320
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tx
D is a great "systems language", but Walter is marketing it wrong: he should
have catered to influential and growing community of C/Linux devs, as opposed
to dying breed of corporate drones who do C++/Windows. I have been one of
those drones myself, and they aren't interested: they're moving to C#/.NET.
DigitalMars does not even have a typical Linux-friendly download, instead
there is a zip with mixed bag of Win/Linux binaries, WTF?

The name sucks too: it's not search engine friendly, try googling for
"exceptions in D" for instance.

Sorry for the rant. I just want D to succeed.

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Zak
It's certainly a step up from C++ or Java. Notably, it has anonymous functions
and lexical closures. I'm not a big fan of static typing though, especially
with explicit type declarations, but I'd certainly like to see D replace C++.

If speed is a concern, everybody's favorite language benchmark[0] shows D
being about 20% slower than GCC. Within 100% of GCC are implementations of ML,
Ocaml, Haskell, Common Lisp and Scala.

So what should you use if you want speed with your power? My first
recommendation would be a good profiler.

[0]
[http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all)

~~~
jey
That's the Digital Mars D compiler being benchmarked. I bet the GDC compiler
is really, really close to GCC's performance since it uses the same optimizers
and backend.

~~~
pius
I think it's within 20%.

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jmzachary
If Paul and Walter could merge their two efforts, we would have a programming
language called "DArc".

I'm planning to use C++ and Python for my startup this year. It's a little
interesting to think about using D and Arc instead.

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pius
There's a D book out (finally): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100391>

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bayareaguy
Is anyone here actually using it for anything?

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pius
I'm picking it up now for one my company's products. We're doing some encoding
that integrates extant C headers; I figured this would be a great time to pick
up D.

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aswanson
What does it give you that Ruby doesn't?

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pius
That remains to be seen. I'm doing some pretty hardcore video encoding and
processing that will use and extend some existing C libraries. I was tempted
to just use the FFI to call them from Ruby (which I still may end up doing),
but I figured that this is a great chance to test-drive D.

~~~
aswanson
Sounds like your working along the lines that I am, except I am using (gasp)
c++. Are you doing H.264/263 or some custom stuff?

~~~
pius
Interesting. My stuff is pretty niche and custom. No H.264 for me. :)

