Coolest D features

Sean Kelly sean at f4.ca
Wed Dec 27 08:45:04 PST 2006


Mike Parker wrote:
> 
> So my point is that Java programmers use Java for a reason. Ask any of 
> them and they will surely point out faults they find in the language 
> (Generics being a popular one). But very few who choose to use Java will 
> cite performance as a negative for *their purposes*. So to entice a Java 
> programmer to come to D, the speed argument just isn't going to fly.

Agreed.  Programmers who are really serious about performance over other 
considerations will likely not be using Java, so this isn't a convincing 
argument here.  My personal problem with Java is that I hate the syntax. 
  Although it's fairly similar to C++ and even D, I find the nuances 
that are different to make it tremendously unwieldy.  And the 
deal-breaker is that Generics are complete garbage--I simply refuse to 
go without a decent way to express algorithms in a generic manner after 
having used C++ for so long.

> To court Java programmers, you have to convince them that D's features 
> are shinier than Java's. You have to show them an advanced tool chain 
> that lets them monitor every aspect of an application's performance. 
> They want to be able to dynamically instantiate objects via a class name 
> string. They want easy use of web services, support for web 
> applications, and not to worry about porting issues across different 
> platforms.

If I were to use Java, these would be the reasons.  And I think D has a 
long way to go here.  There is some library work that seems quite 
promising re: dynamic libraries (DDL), and Mango is fairly capable for 
server/web programming, but D is extremely weak in the toolchain 
department.  Windbg may work with D in Win32, but it's complete crap.  I 
have yet to use it without my debug session ending because windbg 
crashed.  The situation is so bad that I've considered developing 
exclusively on Linux in hopes that GDB support is better.  But 
fortunately, the times I want to use a debugger are so few and far 
between that this remains an idle fantasy.  And as for performance, DMD 
has profiling and code coverage tools built-in, which is a huge bonus in 
that regard.


Sean



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