Is D really terrible for web?

[monkyyy]

On Sunday, 2 November 2025 at 17:13:27 UTC, RexFactorem wrote:
> I'm currently learning D. I'm coming from JS framework 
> saturation looking for a performant and powerful breath of 
> fresh air. Did C++ back in the day and love the language, but 
> not the language surface, especially now than I'm a solo dev.
>
> So I set my claws onto D.
>
> I like to read D code in the wild to get familiar with 
> production-level code, but I stumbled across a repo compared 
> languages and stated D really sucks for Web, which is my main 
> use-case as I envisioned D fit a nice spot between C++ power 
> and Erlang concurrency with ease of coding, through Vibe.d. (I 
> may be wrong. Again, I'm still just a learner.)
>
> This is the repo in question: 
> https://github.com/phillvancejr/Cpp-Go-Zig-Odin?tab=readme-ov-file
>
> It's kind of old, so I'm hopeful it no longer holds true, if 
> that. But I find it hard to find the current state-of-things, 
> so I ask here. Yes, I know it focuses on WASM, but I don't know 
> if this annoyance translates to other web-related uses since 
> many of the projects I found on GH are a few years old, as I 
> don't want to feel limited to "do this, not that".
>
> Here is the quote from the repo:
>
>> D could arguably be #2 either tied with or displacing C++ if 
>> we're just talking about Desktop without web support. D's 
>> dstep tool and importc language feature make interop with C 
>> pretty easy. It has componet wise array operations similar to 
>> Odin which is nice. For me the big problem with D is that its 
>> wasm support is terrible. You can really only use it with 
>> betterC which is D's limited mode that restricts it to an 
>> enhanced C subset. When I was asking questions about using D's 
>> betterC with wasm one discord user kept refering to it as 
>> worse D, which might sound negative but is 100% accurate. Many 
>> of the things that make D good don't work in better C. Overall 
>> using D on desktop is great, but its terrible for the web and 
>> wasm.
>
> Thanks and kudos for making such an elegant language.

opend merged the wasm patch, upstream has not; using the gc will 
probably create memory leaks but it compiles *without betterc* 
meaning you can use phoboes even if it imports gc code(and it 
will)

kaps "parin" has got wasm build instructions and is based on 
raylib, find the opend discord link if your trying to use the 
toolchain, its running but a bit of a mess.

I think wasm wont actually be important but it may replace flash 
for small video games.