"The End of Native Code"

[Walter Bright]

pragma wrote:
> Slashdot had an interesting ask slashdot article yesterday about when is it the
> right time to go whole-hog into interpreted/VM style language development.
> 
> http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/06/06/12/2044245.shtml
> 
> As its an issue that we're all familar with, I figured I'd read and see why this
> article had 1000+ comments.  I was actually quite suprised to find a number of
> people, mostly C++ guys, clamoring for "native compilation plus garbage
> collection" or some variant thereof.  What was also suprising was the number of
> "have you not seen D yet?" replies to these posts, and how well they were modded
> *up*.  As slashdot is peer-moderated, this means that registered users of the
> site had to take the time to hand out positive reviews on those particular
> posts.
> 
> So I have to say: you guys rock.  Remember, slashdot users pretty much hung D
> from the yard-arm on not one but two articles about D.  What I saw today was a
> subtle, but noticable shift in this attitude.  The word finally seems to be
> getting out.

I saw the article when it first came out, but I obviously need to go 
read the followups.

The gist of the article as I interpreted it is that people go to script 
languages because they are more productive. Why are they more productive?

1) garbage collection

2) dynamic typing

3) lots of libraries

D's got garbage collection.

Dynamic typing is interesting in that while it is more productive, it's 
a big reason why scripting languages will always be slooow. It's also 
interesting in that if you look real hard at C++ templates, a lot of 
what they are used for is to fake dynamic typing.

D is moving towards what I call implicit typing - I've been taking a 
hard look at where one is required to specify a type, and instead trying 
to figure out a way the type can be inferred instead (foreach is a good 
example). Implicit typing gets D a number of the benefits of dynamic 
typing with less complexity than the C++ template approach.

D doesn't have lots of libraries. But, in reality, C++ doesn't either, 
because it's too **** hard to write general purpose libraries in the 
absence of garbage collection. I believe that it's so much easier to 
write libraries in D that D will quickly surpass C++ in depth and 
breadth of libraries. Of course, that isn't good enough, we need to get 
to the Python or Ruby level of library support.