How I use D

[Mathias LANG]

On Monday, 29 June 2020 at 09:09:14 UTC, Cym13 wrote:
> The original "Phobos is cool" thread encouraged me to share my 
> experience.

Thanks a lot for sharing ! It's great to see a balanced post by a 
serious user.

You mentioned a few times that you don't bring much value back to 
the language. I don't really think that matters, as it's just 
natural that most people use tools without contributing to them, 
even in OSS. As someone having invested a ridiculous amount of my 
time in D, I surely don't blame anyone for not choosing the same 
path. But if you even mentioned D to a couple of your colleagues, 
that's a good contribution, in my book.

> The difference with D is that I can start very scripty, using 
> no explicit type, then adding details in once I have a strong 
> skeleton. I know that style is often dismissed by more 
> industrial users but it's one of the core reasons why I use D.

At one of the DConf, there was a panel asking: "What do you love 
about D ?"
Suggestions were made, and people voted, unfortunately I cannot 
seem to find the talk anymore. If memory serves me well, what 
made it to the top of the list was "Fast prototyping". And as an 
industry user (and a programmer by trade), I find the same 
advantages apply: We're working on a blockchain project, and the 
ability to prototype quickly, and iterate through multiple ideas 
/ improvements without too much trouble is amazing.
I'm curious, given your use case, how did you feel about @safe by 
default ?

> The only time where I had some issues were that time I wrote a 
> Windows trojan in D. I needed to do some pretty convoluted 
> stuff to load my code in just the right way to avoid 
> antiviruses and it wasn't fun to do it in D.  Cross-compiling 
> this proved another hurdle. It would have been easier in C++ 
> directly. But I can't very well blame anyone not to make 
> malware development easier and none of the issues I had should 
> impact normal development.

If I understand correctly, you're using Linux + DMD ? Have you 
tried LDC ? It should make those use cases much easier (past the 
initial getting used to it, but you can just `alias dmd = ldmd2`).

> The low number of native libraries is not ideal. Yes, I can use 
> a C library or port it from another language but I've generally 
> got less than two days to work on a project. Any time spent on 
> this is time not spent on actually solving the problem.

Have you tried https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep ? Did you 
encounter any issue ?

> For the same reason I am a huge advocate of battery-included 
> stdlib. I know many are of the opinion of moving as much as 
> possible from Phobos into dub.  For me any library that isn't 
> in dub is one more library I have to evaluate, try, keep track 
> of when they update. It's lost time. Huge projects can have a 
> mindset of "we'll manage our own version anyway" but my 
> projects are written in a few days and are useful a week or two 
> at most. So go Phobos, go! We also need lots of libraries but 
> that is the kind of things that is built upon a strong standard 
> library, not at its expense.

Out of curiosity, if you have used Go extensively, was the 
solution they came up with (Github URL) good enough for you use 
case ?