Is D really that bad?

[Imperatorn]

On Wednesday, 2 November 2022 at 03:10:47 UTC, cc wrote:
> 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.

I'm in the same boat. I use C# daily at work, but want to use D 
instead. In the cases I actually did replace C# with D, I reduced 
the codebase by 20% without even trying. That's a huge win to me.

As everyone knows, the less code you must write, the fewer bugs 
you will have.

The expressiveness of D combined with its power is what does it 
for me. Being able to utilize CTFE and generate code at compile 
time is like magic sometimes. With D I never really feel that the 
language is what's holding me back, but rather my knowledge. I 
can't say the same thing about C#, even though I like the 
language.

The reason for making this thread was to get people the slow down 
and think about what it is they really want and need in a 
language. Because it is literally impossible for Zig (for 
example) to be better than D right now (sorry for picking on Zig, 
I could have chosen any other language). Impossible. Just take a 
look at some of the things I wrote in my initial post.

But *still* some people would choose it instead of D. I am 98.76% 
sure that's only because of hype/popularity than anything else. 
Which is really weird. Are we developers really not more 
sophisticated than that? We just chase the next shiny thing? 
Maybe, I honestly don't know. But I'm starting to think that 
might be it.

For example, if D in secret was rebranded to Olympus and given a 
new logo, maybe people would praise it as the best thing since 
sliced bread. "Have you heard of Olympus?" Omg it rocks!

But, D boulders.