GIS and D

[bearophile]

Sjoerd van Leent:
>I've been looking into D,<

I suggest D1 running on LDC with Tango.


>but since D doesn't allow me to dynamically change behavior, it most likely requires a VM.<

With D you can use plug-ins with DDL (similar to windows DLLs). If you use LDC it uses LLVM as backend, it's not a real VM like the JavaVM, but it can be used in several smart ways to generate and run code at runtime anyway.


>Currently, I've been looking into miniD and Ruby as possible languages that could do what I want.<

Beside minD that is written in D, at the moment there are D bindings for Python (Pyd). Pyd is designed for Phobos, but it may be adapted to Tango with some work (probably quite less work than writing binding for Ruby. There will be RuDy, but it's embryonic still http://tomash.wrug.eu/2009/03/03/rudy-ruby-native-extensions-in-d-programming-language.html ).
The usage of Pyd is nice, but it may have some scalability problems, so before using it in production it's better to test it very well.


> User application - An application with custom windows, dialogs and menus to interact with the GIS database(s)<

There are GTK and QT bindings in the work, they may be enough.

For other people here: GIS are a niche market, but there's LOT of money and work in it. So if D starts to be used for it, it can be a very important thing for D development. 

Bye,
bearophile