[OT] Re: C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[bpr]

On Saturday, 28 July 2018 at 15:36:43 UTC, Abdulhaq wrote:
> I think that I no longer fall into the category of developer 
> that D is after. D is targeting pedal-to-the-metal 
> requirements, and I don't need that. TBH I think 99% of 
> developers don't need it.

I'm 99% sure you just made that number up ;-)

For those developers who don't need the performance usually 
achieved with C or C++, and can tolerate GC overheads, there are, 
IMO, better languages than D. I'm not saying that here to be 
inflammatory, just that I believe performance is a very big part 
of the attractiveness of D.

If you're mostly working on Android, then Kotlin seems like your 
best option for a non-Java language. It seems OK, there's a 
Kotlin native in the works, the tooling is fine, there's a REPL, 
etc. I like it better than I like Go.

> We like to think we do and we love to marvel at the speed of 
> improved code, but like prediction, it's overrated ;-)

For you, perhaps. I currently work mostly at a pretty low level 
and I'm pretty sure it's not just self delusion that causes us to 
use C++ at that low level. Perhaps you've noticed the rise of 
Rust lately? Are the Mozilla engineers behind it deluded in that 
they eschew GC and exceptions? I doubt it. I mostly prefer higher 
level languages with GCs, but nothing in life is free, and GC has 
significant costs.