The progress of D since 2013

[rikki cattermole via Digitalmars-d]

On 31/07/2017 8:22 AM, Maxim Fomin wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Good to see D is progressing! I was active forum and bugzilla 
> participant in 2011-2013. Since then I have not touched D.
> 
> What is the progress of D (2014-2017) in following dimensions:
> 1) Support of linking in win64? AFAIK Walter introduced win64 support in 
> circa 2012 which was the big progress. However, support for win64 
> linking was limited because dmd defaulted on old dmc linker, and Walter 
> didn't plan to do anything with this.

Optlink is still the default. MSVC link can be used for both 32bit and 
64bit.

> 2) What is the support of other platforms? AFAIK there was progress on 
> Android. From my memory recollections, the full support of Android was 
> expected at that time.
> 3) What is the state of GC? AFAIK there were some improvements for GC 
> sent as GSOC projects but they were not added in 2013. I see in the 
> changelog that there are some improvements in speed and configuration 
> support was added.
> 4) What is the state of GDC/LDC? GDC team was actively working on 
> including gdc in gcc project. Do gdc and ldc still pull D frontend, so 
> there is essentially 1 frontend (where gdc and ldc frontends lag several 
> versions behind) + 3 backends? I see in the changelog some dmd backend 
> improvements. How the dmd backend is compared with C++/GDC/LDC? AFAIK in 
> 2013 there was a tradeoff: either you use dmd with brand-new frontend or 
> gdc/ldc where performance is comparable to gcc, but frontend lags 
> behind. Is it still true?
> 5) What is the progress with CTFE? I see a lot of discussions in forum 
> archive devoted to the development of CTFE. What is the summary of CTFE 
> development in recent years?

New implementation by Stefan for the purposes of making it faster and 
cheaper.

> 6) I don't see any significant changes in D core from dlang 
> documentation (except those mentioned in changelog for 2014-2017). Is is 
> true or is the official spec as usual delayed :)? Is dlang spec fully 
> and frequently updated or is it sparse as in the past? Is TDPL book 
> still relevant?
> 7) Is UDA still compile-time? Are there plans to make it also runtime?

No runtime reflection has been added during this period (unfortunately).

> 8) What is the progress with shared and immutable? AFAIK the compiler 
> support for shared was not complete and Phobos library itself was not 
> 'immutable-' and 'shared-correct'.
> 9) Does D gains popularity?

Considerably. Downloads for dmd per day.
http://erdani.com/d/downloads.daily.png

> 10) Anything else 2013 D user must know? :) I don't ask about Phobos 
> because according to the changelog the progress is enormous, 
> incremential and targets several directions - I doubt it can be easily 
> summarised...
> 
> Thanks!