How useful is D

James Pelcis jpelcis at gmail.com
Tue Jul 4 11:55:33 PDT 2006


First of all, http://www.dsource.org/projects/ is your friend.  Almost 
all of what I say can be found there.

Lars E. wrote:
> The language itself seems to be very interesting. Unfortunately, there 
> does not seem to be a single complete and stable GUI toolkit, which is a 
> real show stopper - since I can only imagine using D for small GUI 
> client apps on the desktop right now (where it beats Java and C# easily 
> since it compiles directly to native code and links everything in 
> statically - no giant framework download required).

I can't comment much on the GUI toolkit situation.  They do, however, 
exist.  DWT is the semi-official one, but it seems to be dormant.  As a 
result, my recommendation would be DUI/Duit 
(http://www.dsource.org/projects/dui).

There is also a different kind of GUI which D excels at, and that is the 
game engine.  For those who want to make games, there is an engine 
called Arc (http://www.dsource.org/projects/arcgames) and all the 
necessary tools such as OpenGL in Derelict 
(http://www.dsource.org/projects/derelict).  Torus Trooper 
(http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e.html) is a game 
written in D that was featured in, among other things, Computer Gaming 
World.  It has only gotten easier to do since then.


> On the server side, it is impractical to not use Apache or IIS to host 
> your applications, since most firewalls block anything but port 80, and 
> most servers also host web content.

As far as server side goes, the situation is improving.  If you look at 
http://www.dsource.org/projects/, you can see several things that would 
likely be very helpful.  In particular, you might want to look at Mango 
(http://www.dsource.org/projects/mango) and D DBI 
(http://www.dsource.org/projects/ddbi).  They are both under active 
development and might serve your purposes for hosting web content.

> So if you cannot use it on the server side nor on the client side, what 
> is it useful for?

As shown above, it can be used for both client and server side 
applications.  If you look around on dsource, you'll find even more 
evidence of that.

> Does anyone here use it commercially or do you only toy around with it 
> in your spare time?
AFAIK, D is mostly used be people during their spare time.  However, if 
you look up "D's commercial weakness," it seems that it is used somewhat 
for internal purposes only, but that's about it.  I think Torus Trooper 
is the biggest "commercial" success to date.



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