Clarification on D.

XavierAP via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Mar 9 00:57:39 PST 2017


On Thursday, 9 March 2017 at 07:24:12 UTC, aberba wrote:
> So technically and from experience, the current state of D is 
> not the primary issue?

I don't have enough experience with D yet, hopefully someone else 
can tell you better. But my two cents.

"Current state" is a very general thing. Going back to your 
original post, I would not really think memory management 
performance to be an issue at all (in the hands or a competent 
programmer who avoids 'new' inside loops etc); specially for the 
kind of software you have in mind, or even for the most demanding 
real-time applications, where D provides some possibilities -- 
maybe not as idiomatic as the GC 'new', but much better than 
getting void pointers from malloc().

Even in C# for example one's able to make things like this,[1] 
granted it's not quite Photoshop but quite nice; and there must 
be more impressive examples. So I don't think application 
developers should worry so much about GC pauses of death.

Also regarding the "current state", another issue is the 
availability of libraries that you can use in your project. Of 
course D can't yet compare to C++, Java, Python, or .NET in this 
regard, even though there are lots of nice things around (plus 
you can call C and C++ and the bindings are often already 
available[2]). However I think that providing the demand from a 
killer app project could get a lot of support from the existing 
community in completing useful library projects.

I get the impression that most people in the D community are 
computer scientists or engineers who use it for backends, or more 
often for pet weekend projects.[3] At work they are constrained 
to work in another, more commercially successful language. Just 
like Andrei at Facebook.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET
[2] https://github.com/filcuc/dqml
[3] http://code.dlang.org


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