Is it reasonable to learn D

[Robert Clipsham]

On 07/06/2011 20:47, Fabian wrote:
> Dear D Community,
> is it reasonable to learn D?
> I've found a lot of good points for D but I've found a lot of negative
> points too. I believe that I needn't to list all the point for D but I
> want to give a few examples against learning D I've read in some German
> and English boards:
>
> - The D compiler has only bad code optimization

You must be thinking of dmd! There's also ldc and gdc using the llvm and 
gcc backends respectively, they're capable of producing code roughly as 
fast as the equivalent C/C++ applications.

> - There are no maintained GUI libraries

I don't know what the state of GUI libraries is in D, but I have used 
both GtkD and QtD without problem before now. There are also a couple of 
others which have recently had updates.

> - The development of the compiler is very slow

Very slow? dmd gets a new release about once a month with a huge of bug 
fixes - http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/changelog.html - scroll down 
the page, there's a lot in each release. And, since the move the github, 
there's even more going on - 
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/commits/master at least a 
few commits a day, by an increasing number of developers. The speed of 
development has increased a lot in the past months.

> - Only a small community

Well that's a catch-22 - if people chose not to learn it because it has 
a small community, the community will stay small! There's an increasing 
amount of awareness and adoption of D, particularly since Andrei 
released his book "The D Programming Language".

> => no real German community

You'd be surprised - while I don't think there's a dedicated German 
forum for D (perhaps you'd like to start one?) there are a lot of people 
from Germany using D - about 10% of the people in D's IRC channel on 
freenode are German, and there's probably more using the newsgroups. I 
think a lot of people chose to use English anyway as it's the language 
most of the people on the forums speak.

> So I ask you - Is it reasonable to learn D?

Definitely yes! Even if you don't end up using it as a primary language, 
it's a fantastic language with lots of great ideas - I find myself 
missing features from D when I use other languages.

> I'm looking forward to your answers.
>
> Greetings Fabian
>
> PS: If you want to contact me you are allowed to write an Email to me.
> contact-fab at freemail.de

-- 
Robert
http://octarineparrot.com/