What does C++ do better than D? - StackOverflow.com

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Peter Alexander" <peter.alexander.au at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:j129s3$29oh$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 31/07/11 12:38 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 07/30/2011 03:37 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 7/30/2011 1:19 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> You may want to kindly message the moderators to approve manually -
>>>> the post has
>>>> been autobanned.
>>>
>>> Done.
>>
>> It's up. Comment away!
>>
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j48tf/how_is_c_better_than_d/
>>
>>
>> Andrei
>
> It appears there's still a lot of outdated negative views of D in the 
> wild. Hopefully with enough time (and corrections!) these views will 
> disappear.

Definitely, but some of them are understandable and indicate areas of 
improvement for us.

For example, there's a lot mentioned about difficulties installing/compiling 
DMD. Now yes, it *is* simple: Just unzip and use. *BUT*:

1. There is *no* way to know that from the download page:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/download.html

It lists the .zip, but there is *zero* indication that A. it includes 
pre-built binaries, or that B. you can just unzip and use. I bet most people 
(expecually Linux users) just assume that's a source-only distro, since 
that's what multiplatform zips usually are.

2. The precompiled binaries don't work on systems with an older glibc, so 
some people do need to recompile.

3. Figuring out how to compile DMD *is* a royal pain in the ass. It doesn't 
help that instructions for doing so are missing from the readme (in either 
the release or git). And it also doesn't help that instructions found online 
are always either incomplete or outdated. I am working on this though via 
some new features to DVM, but they're not quite ready for prime-time yet: 
https://bitbucket.org/Abscissa256/dvm

Speaking of, at some point DVM should probably be mentioned on the download 
page, since it's a simple, easy, cross-platform way to install DMD.