Some impressions/notes from a new D programmer

[mark]

On Wednesday, 12 February 2020 at 11:46:02 UTC, Dennis wrote:
> Thanks for your perspective. Just a few things are unclear to 
> me:
>
> On Wednesday, 12 February 2020 at 10:39:06 UTC, mark wrote:
>> I don't find the presentation of the member properties and 
>> methods very easy to read
>
> Can you elaborate a bit on this?

Maybe I'm just used to the Python docs, but I find them a lot 
easier to read.

>> The lack of set and B-tree types is disappointing (esp. 
>> considering that the much younger Rust has them). I'm using 
>> rbtree for sets but that imposes a requirement that my items 
>> support < (rather than the == or hash I'd expect for a set).
>
> This confuses me. So there is std.container.rbtree, but you 
> don't like that the element type needs to have an order 
> defined? How can Rust do binary search in a tree that has no 
> order?
> If you are looking for a hashset, you can use an associative 
> array for that.

Naturally a tree needs <. But I want a set and since D doesn't 
have one I can either use an AA or an rbtree and I was advised 
that an rbtree is better for this purpose.

>> However, dub doesn't seem to be competitive with Rust's cargo. 
>> Getting fast statically built (no dependency) executables is 
>> really nice.
>
> I've heard good things about cargo, but haven't used it myself 
> yet.
> Do you have a specific thing dub can improve the most on?

Some cargo packages are applications. If I do 'cargo install 
someapp' it will be installed in $HOME/.cargo/bin. So by simply 
adding that to my PATH, I can easily use all installed rust apps. 
But dub doesn't appear to have an equivalent of this.