Microsoft working on new systems language

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/29/13 5:15 AM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Sunday, 29 December 2013 at 06:00:31 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> I want to make a point here that many people come to do looking for
>> something that is as performant as C++ with the ease of C# or Java,
>> and for the most part (using LDC/GDC) you get exactly that. This
>> language could convince me to go back to C#.
>
> I think neither Go, D or this language is as performant as (skilled use
> of) C/C++.

Wait, what? Go excused itself out of the competition, and you'd need to 
bring some evidence that D is not as fast/tight as C++. I have 
accumulated quite a bit of evidence the other way without even trying.

This also smacks of "no true Scotsman" 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman). Any inefficient C++ 
code (owing to hidden costs of features like unnecessary copying, 
rigidity of the language which discourages aggressive optimization 
refactoring, the many traps for the unwary that make the simplest and 
most intuitive code often be the least efficient) can be nicely swiped 
under the rug as "unskilled" use. By that same argument there is a 
"skilled" use of D that avoids creating garbage in inner loops, using 
allocating stdlib functions judiciously etc. etc.

Clearly there's work we need to do on improving particularly the 
standard library. But claiming that D code can't be efficient because of 
some stdlib artifacts is like claiming C++ code can't do efficient I/O 
because it must use iostreams (which are indeed objectively and 
undeniably horrifically slow). Neither argument has merit.


Andrei