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

[Paolo Invernizzi]

On Saturday, 24 November 2018 at 00:11:37 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 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

I can add that the documentable presence of the LLVM backend in 
LDC since a long time is considered a positive point from the the 
customer point of view. LLVM has a strong reputation, and simply 
add value to delivered product, along with a better acceptance 
that the source code is written in D

DMD adds us values during the development phase, as it's still 
faster than LDC (also if it's not so much more faster as used to 
be years ago).

Paolo