Who here actually uses D?

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:22:35 +0000, Robert Clipsham wrote:

> Having seen a post by Peter Alexander (in Re: D for game development),
> mentioning some of the issues he's hit I thought I'd post this. I've
> been in his shoes (every other time I use D it seems), and feel I should
> ask - who here uses D, and to what extent?
> 
> I'm mostly interested in those of you with 1000 Line plus projects in D,
> as that's when I've found I start hitting issues.
> 
> Just to clarify, for those D purists among you... I'm not trolling, just
> curious (I wouldn't normally have asked, but now I know I'm not paranoid
> and the only one having problems, I thought I'd ask).

I've been using D almost every day for the past 3 1/2 years as a part of 
my doctoral work, as well as for hobby programming.

The programs I've written at work have mostly been rather small ones, 
each of which typically performs a very specific calculation.  But since 
there weren't many preexisting numerics libraries for D, I've had to 
write quite a few numerical algorithms myself -- some from scratch, some 
ported from old FORTRAN code found on Netlib.  This has led to the SciD 
project, which is now almost 28,000 lines.  SciD is a combined hobby and 
professional project in that I add stuff when I need it for work, but the 
rest (probably the largest part) I've done on my spare time.

In my experience, D's bugginess is often very exaggerated.  Some people 
on this forum give the impression that D actively prevents them from 
doing what they need to do!  Granted, I do run into bugs at times, some 
of them pretty annoying, but only once (I think) have I run into one that 
didn't have a simple workaround, or which couldn't simply be ignored for 
the time being.  And the few annoyances I face with D are insignificant 
compared to the major PITA of using C/C++ (which is what I used for 
numerics before D) or Java (which I used for non-numerical programming 
before D).

Yes, most of the time I write numerical code, so there are parts of D and 
Phobos that I seldom use, and therefore there are lots of bugs I never 
run into.  However, comments from other non-pessimistic D users such as 
Adam R. tell me that the above is true in general.

-Lars