D-

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Era Scarecrow" <rtcvb32 at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:jzavmzbmjoyujhqyfvhp at dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
>>> What are your thoughts?
>>
>> There is no way you get a D application into 64K. The language is not 
>> powerful enough. Only C can achieve that.
>
> I'll need to agree. Porting D to a smaller memory space and with cramped 
> features in all of this is not going to be good no matter how you look at 
> it. I'm sure it's similar to comparing using perl in something with only 
> 64k of memory, one must ask where you can put the interpreter, decoding 
> and working with the source text, and many other things, not to mention 
> even if you pulled it off, the speed penalty.
>
> With only 64k, you aren't going to need anything extremely complex or 
> elaborate.
> You MIGHT get away with exporting D code to using C symbols, but you'll 
> likely be stuck working with structs, no library support, no heap, no 
> memory management, and fixed-sized arrays. I doubt you'd need templates, 
> or any of the higher functions. All structures and types must be basic or 
> known statically at compile time. Unlikely for lambdas to be used, and a 
> score of other features.
>
> This is all just speculation, but I think you get the picture. If you make 
> a subset of D, it would most likely be named Mini-D. But at that point 
> you've got an enhanced C without going C++.

That would *still* be a very notable improvement over C. Hell, if you ask 
me, a proper module system alone is one of the killer features of D over C. 
Header files? Seriously? Fuck that shit. What the hell is this, 1970? And 
then there's other things that are *at the very least* icing on the cake: 
Faster compilation, slicing, better safety, metaprogramming (esp CTFE) that 
whups C's ass and makes it much less less tempting to do things at runtime 
that don't need to be done at runtime. That's all just off the top of my 
head.

I find it an absolute enigma that anyone would even consider that wouldn't 
be worthwhile. Ok, so it wouldn't add *all* of D's features...so the fuck 
what? The ones it would add would be more than enough to beat the shit out 
of C.

And like I've said before, why should we be focusing so exclusivly on 
desktop/web developers who *already* have five billion fucking languages to 
choose from, when we're already in the extremely unique position of actually 
having some potential to provide an alternative to areas that *don't* have 
many (or any) language choices available.