A few comments about D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Marco Leise" <Marco.Leise at gmx.de> wrote in message 
news:op.v0noz1q09y6py2 at dslb-088-070-152-209.pools.arcor-ip.net...
> Am 23.08.2011, 05:11 Uhr, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu 
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>:
>
>> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/d-is-d-programming-language-just-too-much-898862/
>>
>> Andrei
>
> So I figure you want to collect some opinions.
> - Garbage collection: I do miss the purity of C here and wish it was 
> really straight forward to switch between GC and manual memory management. 
> The argument that "the program stops randomly" will die hard.

YES! I like the built-in GC, but a *systems language* needs to be good for 
games and embedded. And to be universally good at those, and *really* 
compete with C/C++ in those domains, it needs to be easy to guarantee no GC 
allocations. Can't do that right now without a world of pain. This is 
something I've been hoping for for a loooong time.

> - One clear way to do things:

Ugh. More and more I'm starting to find the Church of Python Zen to be a 
load of puritanical hogwash.

> - string built-in: What the heck is he talking about? I couldn't imagine a 
> more light-weight string implementation. "the same thing with arrays" - he 
> probably doesn't understand that they are the same. Anyway after all 
> nothing would stop him from implementing an array wrapper class either 
> working on built-in arrays or pointers, if he prefers. D's strings are the 
> best that could have happened. (And I know Delphi has a similar approach.)

Yea, the other thing he said about it that really raised my eyebrow was that 
"an array carries around no bounds information". Where the hell did he get 
that?

And the whole "all of the functions that work with [strings] are just 
sitting around in the global namespace"...Uhh...what global namespace?

> - compile app.d: Nice to have.
>

Yup, that would be nice. That's why we already have it:

rdmd --build-only -ofmyapp myapp.d

Or if you *really* need it to be just one switch:

>type dmdc.bat
@echo off
rdmd --build-only "-of%1" "%1.d"