Developing blockchain software with D, not C++

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Monday, 1 January 2018 at 10:46:23 UTC, aberba wrote:
> On Sunday, 31 December 2017 at 09:45:52 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>> On Saturday, 30 December 2017 at 16:59:41 UTC, aberba wrote:
>>> Besides, D maturity (which I can't confirm or deny), what 
>>> else does D miss to be considered a better alternative for 
>>> blockchain in 2018?
>>
>> You can write blockchain software in any language you want. 
>> The reference implementation for OpenChain seems to be written 
>> in C#.
> That's not the point. JavaScript can also be used 
> (technically), but you don't want to use it (for their use 
> case). Seems you haven't watched the video so you are speaking 
> out of context.

Well, the video seems to be mostly about building a large 
key-value store without caching… So whatever language has been 
used for that before would be suitable, basically any language 
that can interface well with C/Posix…

But you want static typing or verification when security is an 
issue, so Javascript is obviously out.

> There is is better when you consider things in context. The 
> talk was focused on a particular context.

Then you need to be a bit more clear on what you mean. You can 
make a lot of assumptions to shoehorn a project to something 
specific, e.g. database will not fit in main memory, but that 
might not hold if you control the nodes and can afford large 
amounts of memory etc. "Blockchain software" is a very vague 
requirement… What kind of load do you expect, what are the 
real-time requirements (nanoseconds vs minutes).

Remember that even Javascript can run at close to 25-50% of the 
performance of portable C… So it really depends on what you do, 
what architecture you design and what the long term development 
process looks like. Mixing languages is often the better choice 
for many projects.

I am not arguing with their choice, but it was for a C++ 
conference, so obviously they would praise C++…