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

[Dave]

Boris Kolar wrote:
> == Quote from Steve Horne (stephenwantshornenospam100 at aol.com)'s article
>> Most real world code has a mix of
>> high-level and low-level.
> 
> True. It feels so liberating when you at least have an option to
> cast reference to int, mirror internal structure of another class,
> or mess with stack frames. Those are all ugly hacks, but ability to
> use them makes programming much more fun.
> 
> The ideal solution would be to have a safe language with optional
> unsafe features, so hacks like that would have to be explicitly marked
> as unsafe. Maybe that's a good idea for D 2.0 :) If D's popularity
> keeps rising, there will be eventually people who will want Java or
> .NET backend. With unsafe features, you can really put a lot of extra

Good Gosh, I hope not, not if that means wrecking the language to conform to those runtimes. Look at 
what MS has done with (or to!) C++.Net - yikes!.

D is aimed primarily at the native compilation / systems programming space, with great support for 
general application programming. Just like C/++. And there will be plenty of room for all of the 
best native / JIT / interpreted languages for a long time to come.

It's the old 80-20 rule - 20% of the available .Net and Java libraries are used for 80% of 
development work. So if most of the effort is concentrated on the 20% most often used, D libraries 
will be a reasonable alternative for 80% of the applications out there. The other library fluff can 
come later. Actually I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's more like 90-10.

> power in the language (opAssign, opIdentity,...) that may work or may
> not work as intended - but it's programmer's error if it doesn't
> (intimate knowledge of compiler internals is assumed).