Herb's Talk at NWC++ (It's interesting)

[Walter Bright]

Sean Kelly wrote:
 > In fact, one thing has struck me over the
> course of the committee discussions: some of the most difficult problems 
> they've been grappling with (like those above) could be solved quite 
> neatly by D's concept of 'volatile'.

Wouldn't that be ironic? D's volatile is an inspiration that just came 
to me out of ignorance as I was listening to Scott Meyer's double 
checked locking presentation on the perils of code motion. I thought, 
maybe all that needs to happen is to be able to draw a horizontal line 
and disallow code motion across that line. If I knew more about 
threading, I probably would have never thought of it.

It's amazing how one's thoughts are constrained by the rut of one's 
experience.

> As for the library aspect, I think the D community already has some 
> projects which are quite competitive with what is planned for C++.  And 
> some of the more advanced bits, like futures, will probably make it into 
> D before too long as well.  Finally, that D is a garbage collected 
> language without object copy semantics makes some things possible or 
> even trivial for concurrency in D that are just not so in C++.  Not to 
> mention delegates and some of the other advanced features that are not 
> even planned for the next iteration of C++.  So I am confident that D 
> will be quite competitive with whatever comes out of C++ 0x concurrency 
> on a library level, and we'll likely have it years before it gains 
> traction in the C++ community.  But again, what truly interests me are 
> the language changes anyway.

I agree. D is way ahead even of paper *proposals* for C++, let alone 
implemented features available to programmers. With tuples D seems to 
have passed a turning point. Andrei always told me that tuples were a 
very big deal, but it's a little shocking how much of a dramatic 
improvement they offer.