Moving to D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Adrian Mercieca" <amercieca at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:ifpj8l$lnm$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Hi everyone,
>
> I am currently mulling if I should be adopting D as my (and subsequently
> my company's) language of choice.
>
> We have great experience/investment in C++, so D seems - from what I've
> seen so far - as the logical step; D seems to me to be as C++ done right.
> I'm also looking at Go in the process, but Go seems to be more of a 'from
> C' progression, whilst D seems to be the 'from C++' progression.
>

Personally, I love D and can't stand Go (the lack of exceptions, generics, 
metaprogramming and decent memory-access are deal-breakers for me, and 
overall it seems like a one-trick pony - it has the interesting goroutines 
and that's about it). But since this is the D newsgroup you can probably 
expect we'll be bigger D fans here ;)

> I am only worried about 2 things though - which I've read on the net:
>
> 1. No 64 bit compiler

64-bit code generation is on the way and is Walter's top priority.

In the meantime, I would recommend taking a good look at whether it really 
is necessary for your company's software. Certainly there are many things 
that benefit greatly from 64-bit, but even as "in-vogue" as 64-bit is, most 
things don't actually *need* it. And there are still plenty of times when 
64-bit won't even make any real difference anyway. But regardless, 64-bit is 
absolutely on the way and is very high priority. In fact, AIUI, the basic 
"Hello World" has been working for quite some time now.

> 2. The Phobos vs Tango issue: is this resolved now? This issue represents
> a major stumbling block for me.
>

If you use D2, there is no Tango. Just Phobos. And there are no plans for 
Tango to move to D2. If you use D1, Tango is really the "de facto" std lib 
because D1's Phobos is extremely minimal. (D1's Phobos was created way back 
before there was a real Phobos development team and Walter had to divide his 
time between language and library, and language was of course the higher 
priority.)

So no, it's really not the issue it's been made out to be.