D versus Objective C Comparison

[Chris R Miller]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2009-01-31 17:03:10 -0500, Chris R Miller 
> <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> said:
> 
>> Michel Fortin wrote:
>>> On 2009-01-31 15:39:17 -0500, Chris R Miller 
>>> <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> said:
>>>
>>>> Anyways, I decided to write up a comparison of the two languages 
>>>> from a less technical, more deployment oriented standpoint.  IOW, 
>>>> examining how well they perform for the last mile of development: 
>>>> deploying software.
>>>
>>> You talk about IDEs in there, and praise Xcode. Do you know about D 
>>> for Xcode?
>>> <http://michelf.com/projects/d-for-xcode/>
>>
>> I never got that working with Xcode 3.0, so I decided to ignore it.
> 
> That's sad. There was a time where it didn't work with Xcode 3, but I've 
> fixed that. If you still wish it to work, please test with the latest 
> verision and send me be a bug report if you still have problems. I'm 
> still fixing bugs when I know it c

I'll put it on the accumulator, though my magic 8-ball says "don't count 
on it."  I've got school again... and this crazy teacher that has me 
print out all this stuff... killing trees left and right this guy is. 
Luckily we just got this fancy new printer with duplex, so that's a big 
relief (plus ADF Duplex scanning - FTW!)

>>> One area I think Objective-C to be very great and that you haven't 
>>> touched is for creating stable APIs. In Objective-C, contrary to D 
>>> and C++, you don't have to recompile every dependency when 
>>> reordering, adding and removing member functions in a class. In 
>>> 64-bit Objective-C 2.0, you can even add variables to a class without 
>>> care about recompiling derived classes. Compare that to D, where 
>>> exposing a class as a public API will either force you to not change 
>>> much that class, or force your users to recompile every time you make 
>>> such a change.
>>
>> Hm, I didn't know that.  I'm not sure it is exactly pertinent to the 
>> main focus, which is towards quickly building software which can then 
>> be deployed to a user base relatively quickly and easily.  I just 
>> glossed over some language features to give a small peek at the 
>> language's killer features according to me.  D's most cool trick is 
>> the ability to implement the functionality of many data structures 
>> through use of its array syntax, and Objective-C is cool 'cause it's C 
>> with objects, sans all the crazy complexity that you run into with C++.
> 
> No indeed. I was just mentionning something I admire very much about 
> Objective-C which makes it very good to build stable yet evolving APIs. 
> Something which neither C++ nor D has.

Yup, someday someone will take the absolute best parts of all languages 
and make one big super-language.  Until then... D is the closest I've 
seen to the one language to rule them all.