References in D

[bearophile]

Franciszek Czekała:

> Insistance on formal tools is a misunderstanding that leads to 
> design bloat and eventually failure (Ada).
>
> D competes directly with C++ as Ada did before. Ada drowned 
> under the weight of its "safety" and so will D if it goes the 
> same route. The only thing needed now are mature compilers and 
> good systems API integration. If anything I would rather 
> consider removing features from the language than adding them.

Ada has not "failed", it's a niche language, but at the moment in 
its niche (high integrity code) it's used and I think there its 
usage is growing. (And Ada is used far more than D, there are 
many important system that use Ada, unlike D).

I think the usage of formal tools is slowly growing (despite 
being tiny).

Probably Ada has failed to become more widespread mostly because 
its syntax requires to write too much code and to state too many 
things two times. And because it's Pascal-like. And maybe a bit 
because of its military origins too.

And while Ada/Spark are safe, there are more modern ways to 
obtain some safety that require to write less code. You see this 
a little even in Rust.

D is not half as safe as Ada, D is C-derived, D syntax allows to 
write code quite more succinct than C# code. So comparing Ada and 
D, despite D likes some extra safety compared to C++, is not so 
meaningful.

Bye,
bearophile