Modern C++ Won't Save Us

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 29 April 2021 at 06:46:40 UTC, bioinfornatics wrote:
> On Wednesday, 28 April 2021 at 13:18:57 UTC, Ola Fosheim 
> Grøstad wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 28 April 2021 at 10:33:43 UTC, bioinfornatics 
>> wrote:
>>> D do not have yet a competitive framework on Big Data «à la» 
>>> Spark, datascience «à la» Pandas/Dask (pandas with multi 
>>> nodes computing)
>>
>> I've found it to be very difficult to move away from Python in 
>> general, it isn't only about frameworks but the massive amount 
>> of focused tested libraries available. For instance, I 
>> recently were to analyze a set of HRTFs (signal processing 
>> impulse responses) in a file format called SOFA, and I only 
>> found C++ and Python libraries for it. I tried to set up the 
>> C++ library, but it turned out to be time consuming, Python 
>> was just plug and play... so I ended up doing everything in 
>> numpy.
>>
>> At the end of the day developer time was more precious than 
>> execution time, which was somewhat slow, but not slower than 
>> the time I saved on development time.
>>
>> It is very difficult for any language to get there, not 
>> because of the computational aspect, but because of the 
>> interfacing, both social and technical.
>
> Exactly the strength of python is the eco-system and not a 
> library alone.
> For datascience they are a rich ecosystem with 
> pandas/dask/ray/numpy/scikitlearn as core.
>
> I see in my works when you have to choose a language is not for 
> a killer app but for a set of library that meet our needs. This 
> eco-system have to be easy to set as our job is to make an 
> application with all requested feature not a try hard path to 
> install and configure new things.
>
> And I am a D fan but for reason above I never yet be able to 
> use D for a professional needs.
>
> Moreover we have to take in account the number of candidate to 
> hire which would like to do a D application … Its is close to 
> impossible to find while Rust most have never used it but it is 
> a dreamed technology and they want to learn it with a 
> professional use case.
> Recently with the declaration of linus torvald that c++ is a 
> shit and Rust is now into to the kernel. The Rust hype growth 
> even quickly.
>
> To me, Walter Bright or Andrei Alexandrescu have to meet Linus 
> Torvald to shown how D is a good language. And After let the 
> influencer Linus Torvald to do the job.

I am afraid it might be already too late by now,

https://security.googleblog.com/2021/04/rust-in-android-platform.html

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rust