Why Ruby?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday 11 December 2010 05:46:33 Michael Stover wrote:
> > LOL. I'd _love_ to use D at work, but so much of our code is in C++ and
> > must
> 
> compile with Visual Studio that the fact that C++ doesn't integrate with D
> all
> 
> that well and the fact that you have to use dmc on Windows for the C or C++
> code
> 
> if you want to link it with D code make it so that it doesn't make any
> sense at
> 
> all to use D at this point.
> 
> Having to use the dmc compiler on windows in order to leverage legacy C++
> code while being able to move on with new D code doesn't sound like too
> much of a restriction.  Is there a similar tool that allows linking D and
> C++ on linux and mac?

When your company has a whole pile of projects in C++, many of which are 
libraries which depend on other projects that you have, and most of them are set 
up to be built automatically on a build server, it is _not_ trivial to use dmc. 
Virtually the whole enginerring department uses C++, and they all use 
Microsoft's compiler for the Windows builds. If you wanted to use dmc, you'd 
pretty much have to move them _all_ over to dmc, which is _not_ going to happen. 
The Linux builds use gcc, and D links with gcc on Linux, so using D on Linux 
wouldn't be all that big a deal (though the interface to C++ could cause some 
issues), but most of what we do supposed to be cross platform, so it's going to 
have to build on Windows. So, unless it's a standalone project that doesn't 
depend on any others (which isn't very likely), there's no way that I'd be able 
to do it in D. If you could link D with Microsoft's compiler, or if dmc was link 
campatible with Microsoft's compiler, then it could be done, but neither of 
those is the case.

- Jonathan M Davis