PHP verses C#.NET verses D.

[Etienne Cimon via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 02:01:33 UTC, Nick B wrote:
> Yes I too would be interested on more background as to your 
> opinion, as why its 20 years ahead of everything else out there.

Natively compiled: Moore's law predicts that the burden in 
advancements in computing speed will migrate into software. This 
may be enough to rule out increasingly the use of managed 
language for developments where cost is important and more than 1 
server will be needed. Compiling vs interpreting can make all the 
difference between requiring 1000 servers vs 10 servers.

Template metaprogramming: This is the first reason I've chosen to 
use D in the first place. The idea that I could write code that 
writes code, and make it statically typed and safe. C++ has this 
but the errors are insane, the static if is not there, CTFE is 
just starting to pick up, there's no traits or very limited 
compile-time reflection (ie. static if(__traits(compiles, { 
some_operation(); })). The compile time is also much slower, 
there's simply too many legacy features in the language that have 
made it suffer in the long run. Even a package manager like dub 
is something nobody can agree on, because the community is so 
divided.

Overall, it would take decades for the most powerful language C++ 
to reach the current state of D in terms of compile-time 
capabilities. This is important because preprocessors are the 
only alternatives and they suck for larger projects.

I won't cover again everything that the dlang site can say about 
the language, and I could go on with how D has the entire web 
stack (I didn't release it fully yet) but that would be throwing 
myself flowers :P