D as a Better C

Michael V. Franklin via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Wed Aug 23 17:35:22 PDT 2017


On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 at 17:44:31 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:

> I confess that I tend to think of betterC as a waste of time. 
> Clearly, there are folks who find it useful, but it loses so 
> much that I see no point in using it for anything unless I have 
> no choice. As long as attempts to improve it don't negatively 
> impact normal D, then I don't really care what happens with it, 
> but it's clearly not for me.
>
> And it _is_ possible to use full-featured D from C/C++ when D 
> does not control main. It's just more of a pain.

I'm somewhat in agreement here.  I wouldn't call it a "waste of 
time", but I would prefer refactoring D's implementation to make 
using full-featured D from C/C++ less of a pain.  I fear, 
however, that -betterC will be the favored excuse for not 
pursuing or prioritizing such improvements.

Consider this:  Rust doesn't need a special switch to make it 
interoperable with C.  What's wrong with D's implementation that 
requires such things?  Granted, D is not Rust, but D's 
implementation could be improved to make it more competitive with 
Rust in these use cases.  For example, there is really no need 
for TypeInfo if you're not doing any dynanmic casts, but the 
current implementation generates it regardless.  I find -betterC 
to be somewhat of a copout for avoiding the hard work of 
improving D's implementation.

Mike


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