Coolest D features

[Bill Baxter]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
> Say you wanted to introduce a programmer friend to D. She might know one 
> of D's sibling languages (Java, C, C++, or C#), but you shouldn't rely 
> too much on that. What features of D would you describe first to hook 
> that friend in?
> 
> Andrei

I'd have to say the #1 thing that makes D great is the combination 
native code speed with the ease of development offered by built-in 
garbage collection.  After that come niceties like nested functions and 
class delegates.  And if you're into templates then D's templates are 
very nice and enable a lot of nifty things that are difficult to do in 
C++ -- (static if! variadic templates & tuples!).  The lack of need for 
header files is another plus.  It gets very tiring having to type every 
function signature twice in C++.

There are lots of other little minor things that make D nicer to use 
than C/C++ and other alternatives (I put built-in arrays in this 
category), but to me those aren't the biggies.

The ability to call C code without a lot of messy JNI-like boilerplate 
code is also a big deal.


I wholeheartedly agree with Waldemar, though, that the things that are 
going to sway C/C++ folks are different from what's going to sway 
Java/C# folks.  D's library and development tools are still rather 
anemic, so most likely that would send most Java/C# folks running.  On 
the other hand, if they find they need to deliver an app that works 
stand-alone, independent of a 100MB runtime environment, or one which 
runs at native speed, then D is probably the closest thing they're going 
to find to their beloved Java/C# that can do the job.

--bb