How does D improve design practices over C++?

[Janderson]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Jarrett Billingsley
> <jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Tony <tonytech08 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Compile times as I am not doing large scale development. And with so much
>>> processor power available these days, I really don't see a problem with
>>> compile times. Some care in laying out code and headers goes a long way.
>> Boost.
> 
> I did also want to make another point about this.  Processors are not
> getting that much faster; it's not 2001 anymore.  We've pretty much
> hit the wall for single-core performance, and compilation is an
> extremely difficult problem to parallelize.  Yes, you can compile
> multiple files at once, but if a single compilation unit takes 20
> minutes to compile, it doesn't matter how many cores you've got.  The
> shortest compile time you can get is 20 minutes.  Even if your
> compiles are "only" three minutes, if you spend three minutes
> compiling, followed by ten minutes of testing, that means you're
> spending almost a quarter of your time compiling.  That doesn't seem
> like an efficient use of time.

I agree.  Particularly when you code gets to a point where it starts 
generating it's own code.  If you have good coding practices you can cut 
down on header bloat and other things to make iterative programming 
faster but at some point good code will start generating code itself 
(particular with templates).  You end up with more code however its also 
doing a huge amount of things.  That's on large scale development.  The 
same can't be said for small scale.