Thoughts about D

[Walter Bright]

On 11/28/2017 9:27 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Why would druntime be a barrier for you for those projects?

When the C version is 90K and the translated D version is 1200K, it is a 
barrier. It's a barrier for others, as well.

Another barrier for me has turned out to be the way assert() works in D. It just 
is not lightweight, and it visibly slows down dmd to have assert's turned on 
internally. The amount of machinery involved with it in druntime is way 
overblown. Hence, asserts in dmd are turned off, and that wound up causing me a 
lot of problems recently. There are even initiatives to add writefln like 
formatting to asserts. With betterC, asserts became lightweight and simple again.

Andrei's been directing some work on using templates more in druntime to reduce 
this, such as Lucia's work. Martin has done some work with array ops, too.

Exception handling support has been a bloat problem, too. DMC++ is built with 
all exceptions turned off. I've been writing PRs for dmd to greatly improve 
things so that it can generate similar code for RAII. (Exceptions require druntime.)

BetterC is a door-opener for an awful lot of areas D has been excluded from, and 
requiring druntime is a barrier for that.