OSNews article about C++09 degenerates into C++ vs. D discussion

[Don Clugston]

Dave wrote:
> Boris Kolar wrote:
>> == Quote from Steve Horne (stephenwantshornenospam100 at aol.com)'s article
>>> Most real world code has a mix of
>>> high-level and low-level.
>>
>> True. It feels so liberating when you at least have an option to
>> cast reference to int, mirror internal structure of another class,
>> or mess with stack frames. Those are all ugly hacks, but ability to
>> use them makes programming much more fun.
>>
>> The ideal solution would be to have a safe language with optional
>> unsafe features, so hacks like that would have to be explicitly marked
>> as unsafe. Maybe that's a good idea for D 2.0 :) If D's popularity
>> keeps rising, there will be eventually people who will want Java or
>> .NET backend. With unsafe features, you can really put a lot of extra
> 
> Good Gosh, I hope not, not if that means wrecking the language to 
> conform to those runtimes. Look at what MS has done with (or to!) 
> C++.Net - yikes!.

I think it's even worse than that. The opposite of 'unsafe' is *not* safe!

My brother has worked with medical software which contain software bugs 
which kill people. And the bugs are NOT 'dangling pointers', they are 
incorrect mathematics (wrong dosage, etc). The code is 'safe', yet 
people have been taken out in body bags.

I think this whole "safe"/"unsafe" concept can be distracting -- the 
goal is software with no bugs! It's just a tool to reduce a specific 
class of bugs. D does many features which help to reduce bugs, the 
concept of 'safe' code just isn't one of them.

> D is aimed primarily at the native compilation / systems programming 
> space, with great support for general application programming. Just like 
> C/++. And there will be plenty of room for all of the best native / JIT 
> / interpreted languages for a long time to come.
> 
> It's the old 80-20 rule - 20% of the available .Net and Java libraries 
> are used for 80% of development work. So if most of the effort is 
> concentrated on the 20% most often used, D libraries will be a 
> reasonable alternative for 80% of the applications out there. The other 
> library fluff can come later. Actually I wouldn't be surprised to learn 
> that it's more like 90-10.

That's an excellent point.