D versus Objective C Comparison

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-01-31 17:03:10 -0500, Chris R Miller 
<lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> said:

> Michel Fortin wrote:
>> On 2009-01-31 15:39:17 -0500, Chris R Miller 
>> <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> said:
>> 
>>> Anyways, I decided to write up a comparison of the two languages from a 
>>> less technical, more deployment oriented standpoint.  IOW, examining 
>>> how well they perform for the last mile of development: deploying 
>>> software.
>> 
>> You talk about IDEs in there, and praise Xcode. Do you know about D for Xcode?
>> <http://michelf.com/projects/d-for-xcode/>
> 
> I never got that working with Xcode 3.0, so I decided to ignore it.

That's sad. There was a time where it didn't work with Xcode 3, but 
I've fixed that. If you still wish it to work, please test with the 
latest verision and send me be a bug report if you still have problems. 
I'm still fixing bugs when I know it c


>> Unfortunately, these two projects aren't getting much attention these 
>> days, mostly because I can't do much with the current state of the one 
>> D compiler that runs on my PowerPC iBook.
> 
> Hm, that'd certainly be an impediment to continuing work with D.

Indeed.


>> One area I think Objective-C to be very great and that you haven't 
>> touched is for creating stable APIs. In Objective-C, contrary to D and 
>> C++, you don't have to recompile every dependency when reordering, 
>> adding and removing member functions in a class. In 64-bit Objective-C 
>> 2.0, you can even add variables to a class without care about 
>> recompiling derived classes. Compare that to D, where exposing a class 
>> as a public API will either force you to not change much that class, or 
>> force your users to recompile every time you make such a change.
> 
> Hm, I didn't know that.  I'm not sure it is exactly pertinent to the 
> main focus, which is towards quickly building software which can then 
> be deployed to a user base relatively quickly and easily.  I just 
> glossed over some language features to give a small peek at the 
> language's killer features according to me.  D's most cool trick is the 
> ability to implement the functionality of many data structures through 
> use of its array syntax, and Objective-C is cool 'cause it's C with 
> objects, sans all the crazy complexity that you run into with C++.

No indeed. I was just mentionning something I admire very much about 
Objective-C which makes it very good to build stable yet evolving APIs. 
Something which neither C++ nor D has.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/