[Semi-OT] I don't want to leave this language!

[bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 7 December 2016 at 06:17:17 UTC, Picaud Vincent 
wrote:
> Considering scientific/numerical applications, I do agree with 
> Ilya: it is mandatory to have zero overhead and a 
> straightforward/direct interoperability with C. I am impressed 
> by the Mir lib results and I think "BetterC" is very 
> attractive/important.

As always, it depends on what you are doing. It is mandatory for 
some numerical applications. R, Matlab, Python, Mathematica, 
Gauss, and Julia are used all the time and they are not zero 
overhead. A fast way to kill their usage would be to force their 
users to think about those issues. What matters is the available 
libraries, first and foremost, and whatever is second most 
important, it is a distant second.

I write D code all the time for my research. I want to write 
correct code quickly. My time is too valuable to spend weeks 
writing code to cut the running time by a few minutes. That might 
be fun for some people, but it doesn't pay the bills. It's close 
enough to optimized C performance out of the box. But ultimately 
I need a tool that provides fast code, has libraries to do what I 
want, and allows me to write a correct program with a limited 
budget.

This is, of course, not universal, but zero overhead is not 
important for most of the numerical code that is written.