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

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/27/13 11:34 AM, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:
> I know I'm probably going to upset some people with this, bashing their
> favourite child and all, but I wanted to let you know the experience
> I've had with D so far, as a novice D coder with a heavy Java & light
> C++ background.
[snip]

We're very interested (and therefore grateful) in hearing experience 
reports.

There have been a number of responses already so I'll just insert a 
couple of brief points.

* The MSB I'm seeing for all of these grievances is that we must improve 
our documentation.

* We used to have reference semantics for static arrays, it was a nightmare.

* As mentioned, "shared" is a last-resort, intentionally limited of 
communicating between threads. We must improve our message passing 
infrastructure (including documentation and examples). Definitely we 
must finish all details of what shared means (and doesn't). This remains 
largely an educational issue because people coming from share-intensive 
language expect to use shared casually (much as seasoned C++ users 
expected to use const casually; this particular issue has been largely 
resolved).

* We need to have a battery of multidimensional array shapes along with 
simple iteration and access primitives, at least for interfacing with 
scientific libraries that define and expect such formats. I'm thinking 
rectangular (generally hyperrectangular) matrices, triangular matrices, 
sparse matrices, and band matrices.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.


Andrei