It is the year 2020: why should I use / learn D?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 03:56:31PM -0800, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 11/23/2018 4:59 AM, Chris wrote:
> > Then there was the whole issue of ARM. Walter said he had no
> > experience with it and kinda didn't care either,
>
> Actually, a person in the D community was working for a couple years
> on an ARM back end, but he eventually lost interest and it was
> abandoned.

LDC is already well able to target ARM -- I've been using it to write
Android apps, and while it takes a bit of work to set up, once it's
setup it works very well.

Frankly, I would not be particularly interested in an ARM target for
dmd: dmd's weak optimizer, sorry to say, makes it a rather unattractive
option compared to LDC.  And now that LDC is keeping up with DMD
releases, I'm quite tempted to just start using LDC for all of my D
projects, or at least all the performance-sensitive ones, since it would
be keeping up with the latest features / bugfixes.


> Building a backend is something usually teams of people work on
> exclusively.  It's a little unfair to expect me to do one spending an
> hour or so a day on it. I can't order someone to work on it, I can't
> hire someone to work on it.
> 
> It had to wait until someone both competent and self-motivated stepped
> up to do it.

I would much rather Walter spend his time on higher-level, more
important D issues than writing another dmd backend.  Though I wouldn't
mind if he gave a bit more love to the dmd optimizer. ;-)  (When will we
get loop unrolling?)


T

-- 
Obviously, some things aren't very obvious.