Blaming the D language

[Domingo Alvarez Duarte via Digitalmars-d]

Hello !

I'll start here a place to blame the D language with the intent 
of register here the dark sides of the language and it's 
libraries with the hope that it will drive efforts to fix then.

First a bit of my experience with the D language, I hear about it 
some years ago and it was an interesting language but it gave me 
the impression of immaturity like a bit more than a toy language, 
most recently I gave it another look and it seems that it 
progressed a lot since then.

I started searching the net for interesting opensource projects 
using D language to test then and compare with C/C++ in terms of 
performance.

Here are my folder with what I found interesting:

ae            dmd-script            harmonia-dad
arsd          DMDScript             harmonia-dad.tgz          
tango-trunk
bcd.gen       dmd-script-1          HarmoniaDemo              
Tiny-Redis
               dmd-script-2          Higgs
bindings      dranges               languagemachine-0.2.5     
ubjsond
Croc          dstep                 ldc2-0.13.0-linux-x86_64  
userman
ctags-d       D-templates-tutorial  libasync                  uv.d
d2sqlite3     d-tui                 LuaD                      
vibe.d
decimal       d-tut-master                                    
vibed.org
deimos        dwt                   minwin
dmd1                                monodHello                
vibelog
dmd2          GDC                                             
vibenotes
dmd-c++       goldie                Pegged
dmd-newmagic  harmonia

Then I started compiling then to test, most of then do not 
compile with the latest dmd compiler, I tried to fix then and on 
some of then after fixing several things I end up finding bugs on 
DMD compiler that I submit and some of then god fixed but then 
one dark side of the D language came to light:

There is no backport/bug fix for the stable releases like gcc or 
other well know software, gcc has at least the latest 3 stable 
version maintained, when a bug is found it's fixed on all of the 
maintained versions that suffer from it. The D language should 
take note/learn from gcc here. Another interesting example is 
Freepascal when a new compiler version is released they also 
release a guide that highlight the major changes and how old code 
will be affected by the changes and examples on how to change the 
code to work with the new compiler version.
I would like to see the dub packages to declare the minimal dmd 
compiler version that they guarantee it'll work, and before any 
new release of dmd use the whole dub packages as a test bed and 
for every project that do not compile write a how to on how to 
convert the code to compile or somehow modify the compiler to 
recognize old constructions and through warnings or other way 
compile then.

It's so sad to see interesting projects using the D language 
abandoned tired of code breakage with any dmd compiler evolution.

Let's talk about libraries now, there is some silly things like 
associative array not having a "clear/lenght=0" way to reset it, 
and people sugest create templates that does:

foreach(string key; aa.keys) aa.remove(key);

If we are on a memory pressure to liberate memory we need to 
allocate more memory for big associative arrays that's insane and 
generate more garbage to be collected (this is a small/silly 
insane dark side).

Now let's see std.str I expect some functions that are widely 
available on other languages to be present there but some of then 
are std.algorithm, std.array, std.container, std.format and even 
on std.str it's crazy for a new developer to find things on 
phobos.

And then the massive/crazy attributes/properties and its 
combinations that makes even harder to understand why some code 
do not compile and give error messages miles away from our actual 
offending code (thanks for templates everywhere).

Well I'll update time to time this post and encourage others to 
do the same hopping that this will drive positive changes to the 
D language.

Cheers !