D in action

[bachmeier]

On Monday, 8 May 2023 at 14:51:44 UTC, Sergey wrote:
> On Monday, 8 May 2023 at 14:31:16 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> To my surprise, a paper I wrote quite a while ago was on the 
>> front page of Hacker News this morning:
>>
>> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35854369
>>
>> I started using D while writing that paper. My coauthor was a 
>> grad student having difficulty programming the simulations in 
>> R. I looked around and settled on D because the 
>> interoperability with R was so easy - we only wanted to 
>> rewrite the bottleneck, not the whole thing. D wasn't just 
>> fast, it made it easy to convert my thoughts into code. That 
>> was ten years ago.
>
> Interesting! Thanks for sharing
>
> Unfortunately there is no approved and mature instrument to use 
> D for R package creation that will be accepted for CRAN

That's correct. I doubt there ever will be, though now that D is 
part of GCC, I suppose it's possible.

I don't know that this is a big constraint. You can add a 
Makefile to your package that compiles the D code into a shared 
library. If you install using devtools, it will build a shared 
library that is installed as part of the package. That is 
actually what I did for this paper - I wrote a package with D 
code and the grad student installed it/used it as a regular R 
package without knowing anything about D.