Thanks from a python programmer

[Chris Piker]

On Wednesday, 10 March 2021 at 12:03:05 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:
> On Wednesday, 10 March 2021 at 03:06:40 UTC, James Blachly
>
> Yeah, if more people just knew about D.

Without a big corporate backer adoption is slow, but I hope the D 
community just keeps plugging along anyway.

> Me and another user converted some python code and got 
> execution time down from hours (stopped the execution after x 
> hours) to under 1 minute (I think it was about 20 seconds on my 
> system iirc).
>
> It was a very pleasing experience.

Similar story here.  I provide a streaming service for a few 
space particles and fields research groups.  Some of the radio 
spectrum generators were taking more than 35 minutes to provide a 
day's worth of data, thus causing client programs to time out.  
It was frustrating because the FFTs ran in fortran code after 
all, so python wasn't even doing most of the work.

After converting the streamer programs to D, CPU utilization is 
less than 30% of a single core (even on debug builds on DMD) 
while maxing out the RAID-5 array.  Response time is now less 
than 18 seconds, which is still long but it's now a hardware 
limitation, not a software problem.

To me D feels like an upgrade, but not a radical break.  Both D 
and python have modules.  Associative arrays swap in for 
dictionaries.  Range operations feel like list comprehensions, 
and I'm sure there are more similarities I've yet to encounter.

The learning curve is a bit steep at times, though Ali's book has 
been very helpful in that regard and the gdc+gdb+ddd stack has 
provided a reasonable debugging experience so far.

Happy Programming,