What were some of your biggest breakthroughs while learning D?

[Dennis]

On Tuesday, 6 July 2021 at 20:53:12 UTC, Dylan Graham wrote:
> [Inspiration from this r/C_Programming 
> post](https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/oeoq82/what_were_some_of_your_biggest_breakthroughs/)
>
> What's something you learnt or realised, a habit you developed, 
> something you read or project you worked on that helped 
> accelerate your understanding and/or productivity in D?

- Arrays and Associative Arrays never need `null` checks. Their 
`null` state is equivalent to their empty state, so you can 
always safely insert elements or query their `.length`. In Java I 
commonly wrote `null` checks at the start of functions, I rarely 
need those in D.

- Template arguments can be any compile-time known value. Coming 
from Java, I was used to seeing types in angle brackets 
`ArrayList<String>` which would be `ArrayList!string` in D, but D 
also allows `map!"a.x"` or `octal!10`. It took a while to get 
accustomed with that idea, but it makes templates very useful for 
other things than type polymorphism.

- [UFCS](https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#pseudo-member) is 
not just syntactic sugar, but also enables certain generic code. 
E.g. an input range can define an `enum empty`, a variable `bool 
empty;`, or a function `bool empty() {...}`, and then you can 
access `.empty` on all of them. Other languages require 
parentheses for the function, or have the habit to capitalize 
constants ("EMPTY").

- This is not specific to D, but the [Git Lens VS Code 
extension](https://gitlens.amod.io/) is really useful when 
working on dmd/phobos/druntime. It immediately shows whether the 
code you're looking at was unchanged for 8 years or recently 
edited as part of a bug fix, and often helps to clear up why the 
code was written when there are no comments.