OSNews article about C++09 degenerates into C++ vs. D discussion

[Mike Capp]

Kyle Furlong wrote:

> If this is talking about my first post in this

I wasn't ranting at you in particular, no. :-) It's more of a general vibe around
here sometimes.

> thread, thats not what I said. I merely said that
> trying to apply the conventional wisdom of C++
> to D is misguided.
> Is that incorrect?

I can't remember the context of your original comment (and the web interface to
this NG doesn't do threading), so I'm not sure what "conventional wisdom of C++"
you were talking about. If it was some specific rote-learned rule like "every new
must have a delete" then you're right, that's clearly daft. If it was a general
statement then I disagree. They're two different languages, of course, but aimed
at similar niches and subject to similar constraints.

The design of D was in large part driven by "conventional C++ wisdom", both in
terms of better built-in support for the useful idioms that have evolved in C++
and of avoiding widely accepted what-the-hell-were-they-thinking howlers. (I don't
know many if any C++ "fans", in the sense that D or Ruby has fans; it's usually
more of a pragmatic "better the devil you know" attitude.)

Also, there's not yet any experience using D in big (mloc) software systems, or
maintaining it over many many years, or guaranteeing ridiculous levels of uptime.
Those raise issues - build scalability, dependency management, source and binary
compatibility, heap fragmentation - that just don't come up in small exploratory
projects. I fully agree with you that such experience doesn't port across
directly, but as a source of flags for problems that *might* come up it's better
than nothing.

cheers
Mike