Thoughts about D

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On Monday, 27 November 2017 at 01:03:29 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On 11/26/17 16:14, IM wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I'm a full-time C++ software engineer in Silicon Valley. I've 
>> been
>> learning D and using it in a couple of personal side projects 
>> for a few
>> months now.
[snip]
>>
>> I could add more, but I'm tired of typing. I hope that one day 
>> I will
>> overcome my frustrations as well as D becomes a better 
>> language that
>> enables me to do what I want easily without standing in my way.
>
> Well. D has it's own idioms and patterns. So we fully expect 
> some of the idioms that are easy in C++ to be not easy in D, 
> and indeed that's kind of the point. If you look at the those 
> idioms that are hard in D, it's probably because said idiom 
> allows you to do some fantastically unsafe (and insecure) thing 
> in C++. Yes, I am sure that it gives some performance boost, 
> but D is not trying to be the pinnacle of language performance.

It sure does. Otherwise there are plenty languages that are safe 
and somewhat fast.
C# or Java fit the bill nicely. Also Go.

> D is trying to be a memory-safe language, quite intentionally

And thus @system is the default, right?
I think memory safety came as an afterthought.

> at the expense of speed (see this DConf 2017 talk: 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDFhvCkCLb4&index=1&list=PL3jwVPmk_PRxo23yyoc0Ip_cP3-rCm7eB). Bounds checking by default, GC, etc. are all memory safety features that come explicitly at the cost of performance.
>
> We are not trying to be C++

True, albeit doesn’t feel like that.

> and we are not trying to replace C++

Patently false.

> It sounds like C++ works better for you. We are OK with that. 
> We always recommend using what works best for you. That is 
> after all why WE are here. :)

That WE might have been just you :)
D certainly tries to replace C++ in a number of ways. It’s not a 
drop-in replacement and doesn’t cover all of C++ niche.