I wrote some D today and it's completely blowing my mind. Ever tried it?

stuntmouse · 2 years

is the D garbage collector precise or conservative?

mahlzeit · 2 years

I'm doing all my hobby programming in D for something over 3 years now ... despite its warts I wouldn't want to work in any other language. It's nothing revolutionary, it's just got the right mixture of ideas for me.

Have you had a look at Tango already? I would recommend checking it out; it's not for everybody, but for me personally D means using Tango as well.

codekitchen · 2 years

My day job involves complex, distributed server-side C++ programming. I don't think any of us on the team are really satisfied with C++, but it's the right tool for the job right now. Our company founder was a huge fan of D and wanted desperately to use it when we started out 4 years ago, but it just wasn't ready.

We prototype a lot of things in D and all pine for the day that the tools and compiler have matured enough for production use. The biggest things holding us back are compiler stability (dmd and ldc are getting there, but they still have plenty of internal crashes and bugs) and tool support (D desperately needs to integrate better with tools like gdb and valgrind).

The "phobos or tango" issue isn't as big a deal to us, since we have to write many of the components (I/O, networking, streams) ourselves anyway to reach our required levels of performance. Though phobos2 sure has a lot of algorithms and range stuff I'd love to take advantage of.

Basically what I'm saying is yes, D is awesome. :) And we hope to take advantage of it someday. If you could see some of the stuff we've been able to do with D in our internal prototypes, and still achieve our required level of performance...

korjagun · 2 years

I love D. But there's one thing I can't get over: extremely lackluster tool and library support, even with Tango. A programming language is only as good as its supporting libraries and established codebase, which is why C/C++ still reigns supreme. I look forward to switching to D completely when the library flora has matured a bit.

xoran99 · 2 years

Are you implying that D programs are easier to port to Windows?

mrfreax · 2 years

I've only tried it a little for toy examples but it's a very neat language. The only thing that kept me from switching over was the lack of a good IDE and the horrible Tango/Phobos mess.

arnar · 2 years

D scares me, because every time someone tries it they either just say "meh" or go completely bonkers over it. Where is the middle ground?

koreth · 2 years

I tried D once but was pretty much turned off by the fact that it's not just one language, as others have noted. Tango or Phobos? Version 1 or version 2? It is pretty much a given that when you start writing an app and look around to see if some library exists for the thing you want to do, it will, but it'll be for one of the other mutually-incompatible variants of the language.

I was also not terribly happy about the kitchen-sink approach to language design; it seemed to me like the designer had a hard time ever saying "no" to a syntactic feature request and the result feels bloated and hard to reason about to me. It has the C++ problem where two developers can write the same piece of code using almost completely disjoint sets of language features and neither person will be able to make head or tail of the other's.

The latter can probably be overlooked to some extent, especially for closed-source projects where you can just choose not to use whatever features you don't want, but the former is pretty much a deal killer and the fact that it's still not resolved several years after I first looked at D tells me the language is basically a non-starter; if they can't get something as fundamental as Phobos/Tango worked out over the course of years, future developments are unlikely to be smooth sailing either.

D is a textbook example of "perfect is the enemy of good enough" -- the greatest good would be served by the person in charge just choosing one of the variants by fiat and sticking with it, warts and all, rather than having the community endlessly go back and forth about why implementation X is better than implementation Y.

Something like Haskell is a better choice for an "I'm going to try a new language just for the sake of learning something new" hobby project because it will force you to think in very different ways.

Halbie · 2 years

I took some E today and it's completely blowing my mind.

Netcob · 2 years

D is amazing. You can write very, very compact code. From a java perspective it's like sorcery ("what? that's it?"), from a C/C++ it looks like a scripting language.

I know someone who's pretty good at it (it's his favorite programming language after having coded in c and c++ for years), and the code he produces continues to amaze me. But that's also the problem - you need a deep understanding of programming languages in general to get what D is doing. Sure, you can use pretty much any paradigm you want, effectively programming like you did in C (with explicit memory management) or Java (with a gc) - but when you use it correctly, it feels like you're targeting the compiler instead of some platform. With that kind of compile-time power at your fingertips, it's easy to get carried away if you understand how it works (or get confused by it if you don't).

Too bad it isn't "mature" yet - there is an eclipse plugin project for it, but it's far from being complete - No real D2 support and no building.

Odditys · 2 years

It's tempting....

The last time I considered it I was turned off of it because I couldn't tell whether it could be just plain old C or if the C++ OOP shit was necessary no matter what I do. If I don't have to use OOP then I would love to start using D where I normally use C.

Sortros · 2 years

Have you had a look at eC?

Here's a page demonstrating what it's capable of, a page comparing eC to C and C++, and their blog.

They've released a programming guide called The Ecere Tao of Programming WARNING: PDF intended to teach eC programming to both new programmers and experienced programmers.

Finally, the eC SDK can be found here.

millstone · 2 years

The entire thread is gushing about this language, so I'll throw some cold water on this party.

D is really, really complicated. It takes a kitchen sink approach, as demonstrated by the list of features that the author posted and the even longer list he linked to; and those features impose a combinatorial, cognitive cost.

An example of how D's feature set makes code harder to follow is the following:

int x = 0, y = 0;
some_function(x, y++);

What are the values of x and y after running this code? In C, we know both values. In C++, we know only y. But in D, there is nothing we can say at all - both x and y could have any value. The design of D makes it harder to reason about this code than for C or for C++.

I don't think D is a bad language, and it does make some significant improvements on C++. But it fails to address the major problem of C++, which is the complexity and confusion caused by a multiplicity of features.

BorisTheBrave · 2 years

My beef with D is that the information pages just plain lie about what features are available. It looks like it has a truly awesome featureset, until you realize that some things are not implemented, or are only in D2.0 (like language features) or D1.0 (like libraries). IMHO talking about D without qualifying the version number is grossly misleading.

I've tried it out (1.0), and it's a lot of fun, but it has enough unpleasant moments in installing and using it (Phobos/Tango Rrrrr...), and fractured community that it's not going to replace C++, which is the potential it could have had.

I think I might try out C++ with a conservative GC. If GC is your major reason for switching to D, re-consider.

Keyframe · 2 years

I use D for quite a while now, and am in process of writing a game now with it. I use D1, not D2 - D2 seems a bit like an alien language to me right now overloaded with everything and a kitchen sink.

D1 with Tango, however, is almost a match made in heaven. Some people complain about libraries - well, in this day and age why would every lib had to be written in your language anyways? extern (C), extern (Windows) work great - C linkage is almost universally supported anyways. Interfacing with .dll (and .so) is easy as pie (I am using, get this - DX9, DX10, DX11! and OpenGL).

Tango is constantly improved and devs are easy going, benevolent bunch open to suggestions and are always helpful. There is a book out there on Tango also, which gives you kick start on D also.

There are some gotchas with D that you must learn through while coming from C or C++ (like I did). For example, structs and classes are always on the heap unless you explicitly say not to with a bit of weird syntax, and stuff like that. But it's easy enough to remember quickly, and makes your code cleaner.

As for the tools - I use DMD right now, while waiting for LDC with exceptions on windows (LDC being LLVM based D compiler). I use Emacs with D syntax highlighting - as I'm not a fan of IDE's in general. There is Eclipse support though if one wants that.

Only thing right now that kind of bugs me is ddbg not being actively maintained anymore - however with transition to LDC one of these days that problem will be gone too.

Also be sure to check out dsource.org as well as team0xf stuff out there.

bart2019 · 2 years

One thing holding me back (oh yes, I tried it) is the 2 versions of D, with incompatible "standard" libraries. So, which version do you recommend? Should I stick to the "stable" D1, or to the "whistles and bells" D2?

I'm not planning on picking up both at once.

andralex · 2 years

Of possible interest - you can follow the progress I'm making in writing "The D Programming Language" in near-real time off my website.

mmazur · 2 years

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD DDDDDD

Nope, my mind still in place.

kbilling · 2 years

My son wrote mini-D. He smart. Look it up. Jarrett Billingsley

onjolt · 2 years

Isn't D still too proprietary? I mean yeah, it's a community thing, but only one single company is managing most of it, at least last I heard. Sure, I guess PHP is that way with Zend, but the army of PHP guys is so huge now that if Zend got nuked, PHP would continue.

Fidodo · 2 years

I was thinking of starting to use D but last time I checked it was still in it's early things are changing mode and I didn't want to learn it until it became more stable. Is the syntax pretty set at this point? I don't want thing to be changing every iteration.

tridentgum · 2 years

Yeah, D fucking owns. Too bad it has two "standard" libraries.

Anon1991 · 2 years

/r/Marijuana comes up on my homepage too, so I thought 'I wrote some D' was some new slang for smoked good shit. Oh, how disappointed I was.

foobar · 2 years

How well does it interface with C++ libraries? I've been thinking about trying some game development, and I'd probably need to use a 3D-engine written in C++.

erez27 · 2 years

A bit out-of-topic, but can D be used for kernel development? :)

I'm tired of writing OO in c

Novelty-Account · 2 years

I read this as

I dropped some D today and it's completely blowing my mind. Ever tried it?

haywire · 2 years

I wish there were some docs and things that compare remotely with, for instance, the PHP documentation. The official tango docs (which I am assuming that tango is the best library atm), just seem like an autogenerated API ref and this confuses me greatly. I bought "Learn to Tango with D, but I need a good reference that explains the functions (like in python or PHP or C). It seems like a language that has a huge amount of awesome advantages for pretty much anything, but either I'm missing something, or it isn't documented or supported very well at all. :/

adamisawesome · 2 years

I think I'll give it a try now. I had heard about D but never really read into it. looks awesome

technomancy · 2 years

I find it hard to believe that D is so obscure

Having a fragmented implementation story with a hefty dose of non-free compilers is a great way to kill an otherwise-interesting language. Just ask a Smalltalker.

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