The progress of D since 2013

[Mike via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 31 July 2017 at 07:22:06 UTC, Maxim Fomin wrote:

> Good to see D is progressing! I was active forum and bugzilla 
> participant in 2011-2013. Since then I have not touched D.

Good to see you back.  I also took a hiatus from D in 2015 and 
just recently returned after GDC fixed a blocker for me.  I'll 
comment on what I've observed.

> 1) Support of linking in win64? AFAIK Walter introduced win64 
> support in circa 2012 which was the big progress. However, 
> support for win64 linking was limited because dmd defaulted on 
> old dmc linker, and Walter didn't plan to do anything with this.

Haven't used D on Windows.  Don't know.

> 2) What is the support of other platforms?

I'm currently only using D for bare-metal type projects and some 
desktop utilities to support that development.  DMD has added 
some improvements to -betterC 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/cwzmbpttbaqqzdetwkkf@forum.dlang.org) but I'm not really interested in that feature as I'd like to use all of D for bare-metal, just in a pay-as-you-go fashion. The compiler is still too tightly coupled to the runtime, but there have been some improvements (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=endKC3fDxqs)

> 3) What is the state of GC?

 From what I can tell, aside from a few improvements to metering 
the GC, most endeavors have not materialized.

> 4) What is the state of GDC/LDC?

GDC was recently accepted for inclusion in GCC (version 8 I 
believe): https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2017-06/msg00111.html

> 5) What is the progress with CTFE? I see a lot of discussions 
> in forum archive devoted to the development of CTFE. What is 
> the summary of CTFE development in recent years?

I believe there is an effort to overhaul CTFE, but it is ongoing 
and not yet committed.

> 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?

I haven't seen any improvements to filling holes in the spec.  I 
believe the semantics of 'shared' are still undefined.

I have seen significant improvements to the website/documentation 
with runnable examples and such.

> 8) What is the progress with shared and immutable? AFAIK the 
> compiler support for shared was not complete and Phobos library 
> itself was not 'immutable-' and 'shared-correct'.

AFAIK nothing in that regard has changed.

> 9) Does D gains popularity?

Not sure.  I've seen some talent in the D community depart, some 
new talent emerge, some talent participating less, and some 
talent taking on more.

> 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...

* Formal creation of the D Language Foundation
* DMD frontend converted to D
* DMD backend converted to boost license 
(http://forum.dlang.org/post/oc8acc$1ei9$1@digitalmars.com)
* DIP1000 merged under the -dip1000 feature gate 
(https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/DIP1000.md)
* Walter claims memory safety will kill C 
(https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/6b4xrc/walter_bright_believes_memory_safety_will_kill_c/), and if you have any faith in the TIOBE index, it may already be happening (https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/)
* Lots of infrastructure improvments (dlang-bot and other CI 
automation)

Overall, though, I'd say D is just further along on the path it 
was on in 2013.  If you were hoping for a new direction, you'll 
probably be disappointed.

Mike