Who here actually uses D?

[Ulrik Mikaelsson]

Hi,

I'm using D (D1,LDC+Tango) both professionally and for hobby-projects.

At work, I'm using it mainly for an in-house developed all-purpose
Mpeg2-TS processing library. (Records, streams, analyzes and clips
Mpeg2 Transport Streams). All-in all, it's working out fine. I've hit
some Tango bugs (really just one i can remember, #1331 regarding
Multicast on Linux), but no LDC-bugs here.

As a hobby, I'm developing a content-distribution-system at
www.bithorde.org. Here I've hit one LDC-bug AFAIR, and a few
Tango-bugs, in general problems with immaturity in the D ecosystem has
been more of a frustration. Not only the pure bug-frustrations, but
using libraries that turned out to be incompatible regarding the
Tango/Phobos-problems, missing documentation, some frustrated
community members, using libraries that turns out to be unsupported.
All in all, general problems related to uncharted territory.

My solution in both cases, since I use Ubuntu as the workstation both
at home and at work, have been to fork slightly old versions of Tango
and LDC and manually applied just the patches that looks safe, and
useful to me, instead of tracking the tips of either project. I've
then created a PPA at
https://launchpad.net/~rawler/+archive/d-packaging. It's worked
acceptably, although quite some hours have went into this of course.

All-in-all, I would rate my D-experience as a 3/5, not unacceptable,
but not reaching it's full potential either.

I still believe D has a lot of potential though, which is why I'm
sticking with it even when upfront-costs are a bit high. I.E. I'm
currently side-tracked working on developing and documenting a simple
safe Reference-Counting framework that might hopefully be included in
Tango and Druntime, instead of realizing my own ambitions of BitHorde.

/ Ulrik

2011/1/1 Robert Clipsham <robert at octarineparrot.com>:
> Having seen a post by Peter Alexander (in Re: D for game development),
> mentioning some of the issues he's hit I thought I'd post this. I've been in
> his shoes (every other time I use D it seems), and feel I should ask - who
> here uses D, and to what extent?
>
> I'm mostly interested in those of you with 1000 Line plus projects in D, as
> that's when I've found I start hitting issues.
>
> Just to clarify, for those D purists among you... I'm not trolling, just
> curious (I wouldn't normally have asked, but now I know I'm not paranoid and
> the only one having problems, I thought I'd ask).
>
> --
> Robert
> http://octarineparrot.com/
>