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Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference

(ddili.org)
119 points teleforce | 2 comments | 25 Apr 25 20:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.817s | source
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usrbinenv ◴[26 Apr 25 03:04 UTC] No.43800544[source]▶
I constantly feel like inferior languages are picked up, while superior languages are discarded. It's almost as if the universe had a law: "inferior technology is always preferred no matter how hard you seethe".

Examples:

  * Python preferred over Ruby
  * TypeScript preferred over Dart or even JavaScript (which is fine and, as a bonus, doesn't require compilation step like TS)
  * Go is preferred over Crystal and D.
While Python, TypeScript and Go are quite alright, there is no doubt in my mind that their alternatives are absolutely superior as languages. Yes, in case of Dart, Crystal and D the ecosystem doesn't have the abundance of well-tested libraries, but as languages they are simply better. The Go argument that it's popular because it's simpler is absurd in the sense that no one really forces you to write complex code and use classes or other advanced OOP features in D.
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1. bnolsen ◴[26 Apr 25 16:18 UTC] No.43804929[source]▶
Having coffee almost 30 years in c++ I really good tired of the complexity of it. Some of the newer complexity being workarounds for (in retrospect) poor decisions made decades ago. Build system situation never helped, and I still despise cmake. When D came out I was interested but garbage collection immediately turned me off, in my opinion the boost shared pointers (later adopted into the standard) solved and shut the door on memory leaks as a serious issue.

And then the d2 fiasco sort of blew it all up. Doesn't help that the language always felt very heavy to me. Likewise Rust feels heavy and cumbersome itself.

So it ends up that I'm another one of those who feels the itch getting scratched by zig.

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2. WalterBright ◴[26 Apr 25 17:42 UTC] No.43805600[source]▶
> When D came out I was interested but garbage collection immediately turned me off,

Only a small amount of D uses the garbage collector. It's quite easy to write D code that doesn't use it.

> in my opinion the boost shared pointers (later adopted into the standard) solved and shut the door on memory leaks as a serious issue.

Reference counting is slow and memory intensive.