Advocacy (Was: Who here actually uses D?)

[bearophile]

Nick Sabalausky:

> Hmm, from that I get the impression that Linus is basically just like the 
> old Java-evangelists except instead of OO being his silver bullet, it's 
> zero-abstraction. I'm almost suprised he allows things like functions, or 
> anything other than Asm for that matter, or cares about portability. I 
> really doubt he'd like D. Maybe he'd dislike parts of it less than C++, but 
> that's probably about it.

Why do you think he doesn't care about Linux portability?

I've seen Linux broken by compiler optimizations present in new GCC versions. If you write very important C code that breaks if you optimize it in new ways (see pointer aliasing troubles), you grow dislike for compilers. He needs a dumb C compiler that doesn't do what it likes. If you write the code he writes, then probably you learn to appreciate the same things he likes. He's not the only person that's writing Linux, the other people after so many years keep doing the same things he is doing, so probably his choices are not so dumb for their job.

See also the C type system extensions he has created for Linux:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse
So he wants a compiler that performs less smart "optimizations", but he also wants a higher level type system to catch bugs. Don't you see a pattern emerging here? :-) I am able to see that he needs something different from the usual application C programmer.

Bye,
bearophile