Tonight: Introduction to D at Codeaholics (HK)

Lionello Lunesu via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Wed Nov 11 09:30:06 PST 2015


On 11/11/15 23:34, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/11/2015 3:03 AM, Lionello Lunesu wrote:
>> Will share how it's received in an hour ;)
>
>
> This is great! How did it go?

Actually went much better than expected! Very engaging crowd, with good 
questions. I think the way I positioned D was being "just another cool 
tool in a programmer's toolbox" really resonated with them. It certainly 
prevented the usual Go vs D vs Rust kind of competitiveness.

Few of the questions I got were

* Why doesn't D explicitly specify the exceptions that can be thrown? 
(To which I answered that I never saw the point in Java and only found 
it tedious. This did not convince the person.)

* Can I use D to build for ARM? (I said that the usual ARM code 
generators of GDC and LDC could be used, and that the runtime had less 
and less [if any] x86 dependencies left.)

* Why the difference between byte[] and char[]? (I explained it as being 
a semantic difference, with no difference in memory layout. One can be 
indexed meaningfully, the other can't.)

* Can I create an array of shared ints (as opposed to a shared array of 
ints)? I said that one could by using shared(int)[], although I have yet 
to try this myself.

* Does D use SIMD? (Yes, and it's leveraged automatically when you do 
operations on arrays.)

* How do the libraries available to D compare to the others like Go and 
Python? (I replied by introducing C/C++ compat and code.dlang.org)

* What if a global function with argument A has the same name as a 
member of A? (I talked about function hijacking and how D prevents it.)

I might remember more tomorrow. Will share if I do.

L.


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