Walter's DConf 2014 Talks - Topics in Finance

[Joakim]

On Friday, 21 March 2014 at 21:14:15 UTC, TJB wrote:
> Walter,
>
> I see that you will be discussing "High Performance Code Using 
> D" at the 2014 DConf. This will be a very welcomed topic for 
> many of us.  I am a Finance Professor.  I currently teach and 
> do research in computational finance.  Might I suggest that you 
> include some finance (say Monte Carlo options pricing) 
> examples?  If you can get the finance industry interested in D 
> you might see a massive adoption of the language.  Many are 
> desperate for an alternative to C++ in that space.

Heh, right before I read this, I stumbled across this snippet 
from Miguel De Icaza's blog from a couple months back, where he 
regretted using C++ to build Moonlight, their Silverlight 
implementation:

"But this would not be a Saturday blog post without pointing out 
that Cairo's C-based API is easier and simpler to use than many 
of those C++ libraries out there. The more sophisticated the use 
of the C++ language to get some performance benefit, the more 
unpleasant the API is to use.

The incredibly powerful Antigrain sports an insanely fast 
software renderer and also a quite hostile template-based API.

We got to compare Antigrain and Cairo back when we worked on 
Moonlight. Cairo was the clear winner.

We built Moonlight in C++ for all the wrong reasons ("better 
performance", "memory usage") and was a decision we came to 
regret. Not only were the reasons wrong, it is not clear we got 
any performance benefit and it is clear that we did worse with 
memory usage.

But that is a story for another time."
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Jan-04.html