What would you rewrite in D?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday 05 October 2010 20:16:41 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 10/5/10 17:27 CDT, sybrandy wrote:
> > Just asking out of curiosity.  With all the great language features, I'm
> > sure that many of you have thought about this.
> > 
> > For me, I figured a good start would be your basic Unix/Linux/BSD
> > utilities, like cat and grep. I figure it may make the code easier to
> > read and maintain as well as potentially improve the quality of the
> > software. Of course, most of these are so old they're probably quite bug
> > free, but some probably could use a rewrite. Some may even benefit for
> > threading.
> > 
> > Anyone else?
> > 
> > Casey
> 
> I wouldn't spend much time on rewriting classic utilities in D. There's
> plenty to be done anew. One category of tools to be written in D are
> utilities aimed at D itself (parsers, analyzers, Thrift bindings,
> protocol buffers bindings, code for DB interface, etc.)
> 
> Andrei

Indeed.

It could be reasonable to convert existing C or C++ code to D if you're going to 
be heavily changing it, but converting pre-existing applications which are 
currently in C or C++, and which you don't need to maintain, seems like a waste 
of time. It _could_ be an interesting exercise in how to do things in D and 
could very well show shortcomings in D, dmd's current implementation, and/or 
shortcomings in Phobos, but then so would new applications.

At this point, if I can choose what language I'm going to write something in, 
I'm almost certainly going to choose D (though obviously stuff like GUI apps may 
not really be properly feasible in D yet, and some things are just gonig to work 
better in other languages), but I have enough to do (and not enough time to do 
it) without spending the time to rewrite entire, working applications in D.

- Jonathan M Davis