Games people play

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Any web developers here? What would _you_ like, wish, need, if you were
> just starting a web project in D??

The most valuable thing would be a agile, customizable, modern framework
for doing serious, large scale web apps. Maybe a low level framework.

I've done some coding with Ruby on Rails lately on smallish projects
(<40 db tables, <80 html "pages"). IMO the biggest weaknesses in Ruby
are it's speed and lack of compile-time syntax/type checking. I haven't
studied these IL-compilers (e.g http://rubyforge.org/projects/cardinal/)
a lot - maybe they'll fix the latter issue. However, there's not much
point in fighting Ruby on its very own battleground. Even with
reflection, high level structures, superb web application libraries a
general purpose c-like language cannot provide all the dynamical
functionality that Ruby and Rails have. It would also be quite stupid to
only stick with Ruby. Complex systems seem to be hybrids consisting of
several languages&environments for different purposes.

Currently these lower level systems are made with existing languages
that may not be optimal for their purpose. C does not provide much
support for complex architectures. C++ has its problems. I think the
solution would be to focus on architectural issues in D. Templates and
reflection fit nicely here. So do also lazy evaluation, design by
contract and D scopes.

One thing I don't understand in D is AFAICT that the abstraction of
classes is somewhat broken, namely the use of interfaces. Last time I
checked it was quite impossible to implement all GoF design patterns
without quirks because you have to cast interfaces to (some unknown)
classes before being able to call their public methods. How can a
predefined framework know beforehand about classes made by the end user.