D as a Better C

[Iain Buclaw via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 23 August 2017 at 19:44, Jonathan M Davis via
Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 13:12:04 Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d-
> announce wrote:
>> To coincide with the improvements to -betterC in the upcoming DMD
>> 2.076, Walter has published a new article on the D blog about
>> what it is and why to use it. A fun read. And I'm personally
>> happy to see the love this feature is getting. I have a project
>> I'd like to use it with if I can ever make the time for it!
>>
>> The blog:
>>
>> https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/23/d-as-a-better-c/
>>
>> Reddit:
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6viswu/d_as_a_better_c/
>
> 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.
>

It's getting better, there are certainly some tough topics that need
to be addressed in the compiler implementation.

The GDC camp concurs with the sentiment of betterC being a waste of
time.  My particular stance on the matter is that it should not be an
all or nothing switch, granular control is fine.  The compiler should
(and can!) produce a very small footprint whilst using the expressive
richness of the language.

For instance, a D project targeting STM board, makes heavy use of
classes and templates, resultant code segment is 3k.

https://github.com/JinShil/stm32f42_discovery_demo#the-good

I quote the author here that when building the project, there is:

"""
No Stinking -betterC. If you don't want the overhead of a certain
feature of D, don't use it. -betterC is just a synonymn for -worseD.
"""