What's your opinion on Functional D?

[Michael Rynn]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 08:05:26 -0400, Hans-Eric Grönlund
<hasse42g at gmail.com> wrote:

>A little shameless self-promotion here, but I'd really love to hear your opinions on the subject:
>
Who has a real  informed opinion to give?  My imperative verbal troll
brain has swirling questions from my functional parallel subconcious,
and I have taken in only the basic concepts of functional (invariant
style) programming, from following the references given so far in this
news group.

what is the vision for functional D?

I would like to understand a broader example of how an application /
library practical example can be coded in functional and imperative
parts.  Little code bits do not mean much out of a practical task
context.

Write the example, then craft the compiler to show it off. Tell us
what has been possible with the functional approach.
 How well functional approach helped in other functional capable
languages?  I presume its the hard part, getting  good productivity of
bug free code with reasonable performance from fallable human
programmers.

How will a largely imperative code application fire off multi-threaded
functional parts and synchonize them  in the larger application
design?. Or are we going to write largely functional programs which
have allowed  bits of imperative code in them?

How much extra complexityin D?  Does it add coding cost (or
simplification), for how much gain?  It must be hard to say  with
something new and with imperfect knowledge of how its going to go. How
much of current D will have to change?  How much futher for D2?

How long before a functional D implementation will be avaiable for
production code?
Will there be functional and imperative styled versions of libraries?

Is there a trade off between single  thread performance loss vs
multithreaded performance gain? As a plodding imperative programmer I
lack experience in the functional programming world. 

If its an extra bonus for D as it is, additional functional
programming choices sound great, as long as imperative capabilities
not lost. If the compiler can do the grunt work for the programmer,if
D has a functional destiny, go for it.   Is this the killer niche for
D?

Michael Rynn