Is D really that bad?

[cc]

On Friday, 28 October 2022 at 11:39:12 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> the better it is, the more any perceived flaw is painted as 
> huge and "show-stopper".

This is a truth I have encountered numerous times in game design. 
  The more rich and rewarding your feature set and environment 
are, the more it generates a sense of "well, if only it was 
BETTER, THEN it would be just what I wanted!"  The more 
restricted something is, the more content one remains with what 
has been accomplished within the bounds of the design.

And to respond to the OP, D is definitely good enough that I 
don't want to switch to anything else for this purpose when I 
don't have to!  And by good enough, I mean great.  I definitely 
feel D is the "should have been, but wasn't" language that C# 
ended up becoming for claiming the gaming industry (or at least 
squeezing alongside C++, which will sadly never leave us).  It's 
just a joy to program in, the metaprogramming capabilities are 
fantastic.  I don't know how to really quantify whether D does 
them "better" than other languages, but it always feels *cleaner* 
to me.  I am not a language design expert, I am just a humble 
tiller of the soil that is allotted to me.  But IMO D lets you 
write things that end up looking beautiful.  I put together a 
quick RPC module to call functions on client objects from their 
server representations in a multiplayer game engine.  All 
parameters matched for implicit conversions, marshaled, bundled 
and prepared for network sending.  Hard compiler errors on any 
mismatches.  Any method I want replicable, All I need to do is 
just drop a UDA onto it.  No complicated lookup tables or list of 
mangles or serialization definition documents.  No need to add 
any code or create stubs anywhere else in the project.  It all 
"just works".  The entire RPC module?  194 lines of code.  Brings 
a tear to my eye.  The thought of building the equivalent in C# 
gives me a headache.  C++?  Migraine.  And I do not care for Rust.


On Friday, 28 October 2022 at 13:23:42 UTC, Adam D Ruppe wrote:
> in fact
>
> d rox

This.  Although I do agree that allocators should be tuned up and 
taken out of experimental.  I would personally love to see 
alternative memory management strategies made to feel more "at 
home" as base language features, instead of tricks with structs 
and templates.  Just my pipedream.