too early for D2 and too late for D1

Jacob Carlborg doob at me.com
Mon Apr 18 03:46:46 PDT 2011


On 2011-04-17 22:27, Daniel Gibson wrote:
> Am 17.04.2011 21:52, schrieb jasonw:
>> Gour-Gadadhara Dasa Wrote:
>>
>>> Well, http://d-programming-language.org/ page says: "D is a multi-
>>> paradigm programming language that combines a principled approach
>>> with a focus on *practicality*." and in my case I've *practical* need to
>>> write GUI app.
>>
>> That's certainly true, if you think of the potential D2 provides. In 5 -- 20 years D will be a serious contestant and mature implementations beat C++ and traditional languages in many domains. Currently DMD produces much slower executables especially for high performance computing so you would be a total idiot to use D if the project time frame is less than 2 years.
>
> *Much* slower? Really? What benchmarks are you citing?
>
>>
>> If you want to build some fortune 500 website from scratch, D doesn't deliver the functionality you need right now. The PHP/Java/C# platforms have hundreds of millions worth funding backing them.
>>
>> If you build a desktop application, D isn't the best choice, but you can still argue to your boss to use it instead because of your personal "productivity" issues. There's no other logical reason to use D instead of C++/Qt or some other mature GUI toolkit.
>>
>> Bloated executables aren't suitable for embedded platforms either, but in 10 -- 20 years we will have a D compiler that targets platforms with less than 4 MB of RAM+ROM. I find it unlike that we have a reliable D compiler for very small 32-bit embedded devices in 5 years.
>
> Do you really think in "10 -- 20 years" somebody will care of your code
> runs in an embedded platform with only 4MB of RAM+ROM? Memory etc is so
> cheap that these platforms will get more powerful.
>
> Why should it take so long to have such a compiler?
> On the one hand: Why are D executables so "bloated"?
> 1. Phobos and druntime is statically compiled in. On a really limited
> embedded platform you wouldn't use Phobos anyway, but write your own
> standardlib and runtime that suit your needs (it's not like anybody
> would use full C++ with STL on such a platform. Well, probably not even
> C++ at all or only a very limited subset).

This is quite a big advantage C and C++ have. The runtime will almost 
always be available on the platform and you can link to it dynamically.

You can use Tango as a dynamic library on Mac OS X and a Hello World 
application will be the same size as a Hello World application written in C.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg


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