D

[Dave]

"Jarrett Billingsley" <jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.26.1227226037.22690.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:54 PM, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> == Quote from bearophile (bearophileHUGS at lycos.com)'s article
>>> D is a fringe language, and it's not an easy one (system language and 
>>> all that),
>> so there's never shortage of unusual people in this newsgroup :-)
>>> Java groups are so boooring compared to this one :-)
>>> Bear hugs,
>>> bearophile
>>
>> Do people seriously consider D a "difficult" language?  Given that it has 
>> garbage
>> collection out of the box, builtin arrays, etc. I would have guessed that 
>> most
>> people only consider it to be of moderate difficulty.  Yes, you *can* do
>> down-and-dirty programming with pointers, manual memory management, etc. 
>> in it,
>> but you don't *have to* unless the nature of your problem domain would 
>> require it
>> no matter what the language.
>>
>
> Or if you're absolutely obsessed with microperformance and attempt to
> subvert the GC at every possible opportunity.
>
> (Consider who you're replying to ;) )

It seems that bearophile basically wants a GP / systems language and tools 
that are nearly as productive as the likes of Python but can also produce 
blazingly fast code. A pretty worthy goal, and I think that was the orginal 
blanket idea behind D anyway. To win mindshare I think D has to be able to 
do better than more established languages in both areas.

Look at the time and $$$ spent on making Java "fast". Not a trivial subject.

Besides, there has been in previous years a good deal of initial interest 
from members of two important groups where performance is vital: numeric and 
game software developers. Over the years and more often than not it seems, 
various members of both groups drop in to the NG's but end-up showing only a 
fleeting interest in D. Most of the reason I think is because performance 
isn't stellar, and even more that D (the language, as specified) doesn't 
offer any advantage in that regard over the tried and true like Fortran and 
C/++.

I don't think D will succeed without healthy backing from at least one of 
those groups. After all, if you're developing a "high-performance" language, 
customers of organizations who sell Fortran compilers, math and physics 
libraries and HPC hardware are pretty desirable to have on your side..

So bearophile might be onto something there...