Why I chose D over Ada and Eiffel

[Tyler Jameson Little]

On Wednesday, 21 August 2013 at 17:45:29 UTC, Ramon wrote:
> On Wednesday, 21 August 2013 at 17:17:52 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> You want no bugs ? Go for Haskell. But you'll get no 
>> convenience or performance. The good thing if that if it does 
>> compile, you are pretty sure that it does the right thing.
>
> Why should I? Isn't that what D promises, too (and probably is 
> right)?
>
> On another perspective: Consider this question "Would you be 
> willing to have all your software (incl. OS) running 10% or 
> even 20% slower but without bugs, leaks, (unintended) backdoors 
> and the like?"
>
> My guess: Upwards of 80% would happily chime "YES!".

Have you looked at Rust? It promises to solve a few of the 
memory-related problems mentioned:

- no null pointer exceptions
- deterministic free (with owned pointers)
- optional garbage collection

It also has generics, which are runtime generics if I'm not 
mistaken. It doesn't have inheritance in the traditional OO 
sense, so you may not like that. I really like that it's LLVM 
compiled, so performance and cross-compiling should be pretty 
much solved problems.

There are still things that keep me here with D though:

- templates instead of generics (little reason to take a 
performance hit)
- CTFE
- inheritance (though I hardly use classes, they're handy 
sometimes)
- community
- array operations (int[] a; int[]b; auto c = a * b;)
   - I don't think these are automagically SIMD'd, but there's 
always hope =D
- similar to C++, so it's easy to find competent developers