My thoughts & experiences with D so far, as a novice D coder

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:13:31 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 07:06:45PM +0100, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:
> [...]
> > 
> > I find it quite nice that you have both value and reference types,
> > and for the most part it's rather clear in D when you're dealing
> > with a reference and when you're dealing with a value. It was just
> > arrays that caught me off guard, and I think others with a similar
> > background may do the same mistake, so my comment about this really
> > just is "arrays may require more explanation aimed at Java
> > developers" :)

Yea, the arrays definitely do blur the value/reference lines. Aside
from static/dynamic, another example of this is how a dynamic array's
*values* are reference, but it's length is by-value. Of course, it's
very simple when you realize that a D dynamic array is more-or-less
like this:

struct Array(T)
{
    size_t length;
    T* ptr;
}

But still, it's definitely something to get used to.

> > >But D has an easy solution - just use RDMD instead:
> > >
> > >rdmd --build-only -I{include paths as usual} {other flags} main.d
> > 
> > That's a good tip! Somehow I had the notion that rdmd was purely a
> > tool for "scripting", as in dynamically parsing code (like Python,
> > Perl, etc), so I never looked much into it.

It was originally designed for scripting uses. But making that work
well required adding the feature of "*automatically* detect and compile
all required sources". And that feature turned out to be very useful
just for its own sake, so RDMD grew into something that could nicely
handle both.

> 
> rdmd gives D a scripting-like interface, but D is inherently a
> compiled language, so it isn't actually a D interpreter. :) 

Sure it is! It's an AOT interpreter!

(Which is ironically something very well-respected and sought-after in
interpreted-language circles. Go figure: they've reinvented native
compilation and simply gave it a new name.)