OT: Your accomplishments in 2013 and plans for 2014

[bearophile]

Francesco Cattoglio:

> Honestly, to my eyes, Julia really looks like a "better 
> Matlab", with a heckload of stuff packed in his standard 
> library.
> I have not yet experimented with it but I don't like the 
> premises that much.
>
> In short: I think D language can do as much as Julia can do, 
> with pretty much same bang for the buck.

Look better, Julia aims also at partially replacing Python as 
golden glue in scientific computing, and it seems to have some of 
the numbers for it. It's statically typed, it has type 
inferencing, a refined type system with multi-methods and more, 
and a good LLVM-based JIT (that's in my benchmarks produces a 
performance no more than 2-4 times slower than D compiled with 
ldc2. If you compile D with dmd Julia is often faster for 
FP-heavy code. This means it's much faster than any Python code). 
It's better than Matlab about as much as D is better than C, and 
it's already better than Python for some things :-) And Julia is 
currently much more flexible than D (there's a REPL, lot of 
scientific routines in the std lib, and the JIT). In two years 
its easy to write code has allowed lot of people to write more 
standard library than D community has done in 7 years. For the 
kind of purposes Julia is designed for, I don't think D has the 
upper hand, it seems D has already lost that race, despite Julia 
is rather younger. D remains my preferred for general or heavy 
computing.

Bye,
bearophile