The progress of D since 2013

[Guillaume Piolat via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 31 July 2017 at 07:22:06 UTC, Maxim Fomin wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Good to see D is progressing! I was active forum and bugzilla 
> participant in 2011-2013. Since then I have not touched D.

Welcome back :)

> 3) What is the state of GC? AFAIK there were some improvements 
> for GC sent as GSOC projects but they were not added in 2013. I 
> see in the changelog that there are some improvements in speed 
> and configuration support was added.

"GC" is still the thing that come up as objection from native 
programmers. Recently the perception shifted a bit thanks to the 
D blog (and indeed most users have no irredeemable problems with 
it).

-profile=gc and @nogc makes GC avoidance much simpler than in the 
past.


> 4) What is the state of GDC/LDC? GDC team was actively working 
> on including gdc in gcc project. Do gdc and ldc still pull D 
> frontend, so there is essentially 1 frontend (where gdc and ldc 
> frontends lag several versions behind) + 3 backends? I see in 
> the changelog some dmd backend improvements. How the dmd 
> backend is compared with C++/GDC/LDC? AFAIK in 2013 there was a 
> tradeoff: either you use dmd with brand-new frontend or gdc/ldc 
> where performance is comparable to gcc, but frontend lags 
> behind. Is it still true?

LDC got Win32 and Win64 backends. DMD still compiles faster, but 
generates slower code (about 2x).

> 6) I don't see any significant changes in D core from dlang 
> documentation (except those mentioned in changelog for 
> 2014-2017). Is is true or is the official spec as usual delayed 
> :)? Is dlang spec fully and frequently updated or is it sparse 
> as in the past? Is TDPL book still relevant?

There are several relevant books to own now.


> 9) Does D gains popularity?

Yes, from all directions. More and more risk-adverse programmers 
are considering using it, it's not exclusivey early adopters 
anymore.


> 10) Anything else 2013 D user must know? :) I don't ask about 
> Phobos because according to the changelog the progress is 
> enormous, incremential and targets several directions - I doubt 
> it can be easily summarised...

Use DUB, it makes everyone's life easier.
http://code.dlang.org/