Discussion about D at a C++ forum

Mehrdad wfunction at hotmail.com
Sun Jan 8 15:28:54 PST 2012


On 1/7/2012 10:57 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Not exactly the most informed discussion.

Well, some of their comments _ARE_ spot-on correct...

2. "While you can avoid the garbage collector, that basically means you 
can't use most of the standard library."
     Looks pretty darn correct to me -- from the fixed-size array 
literal issue (literals are on the GC heap), to all the string 
operations (very little is usable), to associative arrays (heck, they're 
even part of the language, but you can't use them without a GC), etc...

3. "The community really has a Java feel to it. They often don't care as 
much for efficiency as say a C++ programmer would."
    I'm pretty darn sure this is referring to #7, and I think it's 
pretty accurate. SP programmers should /know/ what they're doing, so not 
letting them delete GC'd objects manually is kinda stupid, and a pretty 
Java-like approach. Looks well-informed to me.

4. "Binary sizes are currently stupid. A simple hello program with DMD 
is over half a megabyte and with GDC, is nearly 1.4mB. This is mostly 
because it will not dynamically link to phobos (see below). They're 
working on this... This isn't the fault of the language."
    Looks pretty darn informed. You guys _are_ working on this, and this 
/has/ been an issue, and it obviously isn't the language's fault, so....

5. "Has poor shared library support (although this has grown 
significantly)."
    Looks 100% correct. Not sure what they mean by "there are symbol 
resolution problems because of the GC", but it's true that shared 
library support is poor right now, isn't it?

7. Unstable language. They're currently considering doing things like 
removing "delete" as it's apparently deprecated (which will officially 
make it not usable as an SP language).
    Looks 100% correct. Removing 'delete' /does/ make D unusable as an 
SP language... unless you ignore the GC completely, which isn't even 
possible, practically speaking.


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