A few comments about D

[Marco Leise]

Am 23.08.2011, 05:11 Uhr, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org>:

> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/d-is-d-programming-language-just-too-much-898862/
>
> Andrei

So I figure you want to collect some opinions.
- Garbage collection: I do miss the purity of C here and wish it was  
really straight forward to switch between GC and manual memory management.  
The argument that "the program stops randomly" will die hard.
- Delegates: They feel modern and can be put to good use.
- One clear way to do things: Actually that is what I like about Java. But  
I understand that as soon as you mix programming paradigms the way D does  
there are multiple approaches. As an OO programmer I prefer  
interchangeable container classes and for operations on "ranges" there is  
your neat library implementation, which I find innovative. Now it just  
doesn't feel quite natural to bring them together. See also the talk about  
the use of reference type ranges. Practically all containers should work  
with the range API.
- string built-in: What the heck is he talking about? I couldn't imagine a  
more light-weight string implementation. "the same thing with arrays" - he  
probably doesn't understand that they are the same. Anyway after all  
nothing would stop him from implementing an array wrapper class either  
working on built-in arrays or pointers, if he prefers. D's strings are the  
best that could have happened. (And I know Delphi has a similar approach.)
- unit tests & ddoc: :D - only I'd like to see some more hierarchy in the  
documentation. The symbol list on top looks like a crime to me.
- compile app.d: Nice to have.


- Marco