D popularity

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Mon Jan 21 09:54:13 PST 2013


On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 05:32:12PM +0100, monarch_dodra wrote:
> The only thing holding me back from D is that it is unreliable. I'm
> not just talking about bugs in Phobos (which can easilly found and/or
> fixed).
> 
> I'm talking about all the unreliable voldemort structs, the context
> pointers, the delegates, the destructor sequences, memory management
> and whatnot.

Oh? What's so unreliable about delegates? I find that they work quite
well in general.

But yeah, anything involving dtors is treading on a minefield. As is
structs with hidden context pointers. It was presented in a very
attractive way in TDPL, but given the treatment of structs as value
types ("glorified ints" as TDPL puts it), having hidden context pointers
involving them is a dangerous game.


> I can see that these issues are being fixed and worked on, but today,
> I would NEVER even dream of using D in a professional project.
> 
> The only way for that to work would be to use a "restricted D": No
> non-static structs, no allocating delegates etc. It's a hard sell to
> management.

I don't find the need to use non-static structs that often, actually.
Delegates, yes, but I haven't found any showstopper issues with them
yet.


> I use it at work to quickly deploy helper scripts, because it is so
> easy, and I know what I'm doing, but it stops there. It HAS to stop
> there :( ...

What I find frustrating with D is that most features work extremely well
when used in isolation, but put them together with each other, and
suddenly you're in untested territory filled with bugs and obscure
corner cases with buggy behaviours.


T

-- 
Knowledge is that area of ignorance that we arrange and classify. -- Ambrose Bierce


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