Advocacy (Was: Who here actually uses D?)

[bearophile]

Walter:

> Yeah, I don't think Linus would find D appealing.

Even if this is true, some Microsoft researchers are trying to show that even a-bit-higher level (well, middle level) languages may be fit for kernel development.
Compared to C they are worse because they lead to some loss of low-level control on the produced assembly.
But if they are well designed (for this purpose) they give something else back: more safety thanks to stronger static guarantees. This higher safety in turn is useful to statically disable/avoid some run-time tests that a kernel written in C must perform (this among other things helps regain some or all the performance lost in not using C). Is D fit for this? I don't think so. But an extension of D language may become good enough.

Bye,
bearophile