alt Hacker NewsD Programming Language
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I like D in general, however it is missing out in WASM where other languages like Rust, Zig, even Go are thriving. Official reasoning usually included waiting for GC support from WASM runtime, but other GC languages seem to just ship their own GC and move on.
How good are the big LLMs at writing D code? Just curious.
I often see people lament the lack of popularity for D in comparison to Rust. I've always been curios about D as I like a lot of what Rust does, but never found the time to deep dive and would appreciate someone whetting my appetite.
Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't?
What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)?
As far as adoption is concerned, I'm not sure it should be that big of a concern.
After all, D is supported by GCC and Clang and continually being maintained, and if updates stopped coming at some point in the future, anyone who knew a bit of C / Java / insert language here could easily port it to their language of choice.
Meanwhile, its syntax is more expressive than many other compiled languages, the library is feature-rich and fairly tidy, and for me it's been a joy to use.
What can D do other languages can't?
Say your starting a new Staff Engineer or Tech Lead job. What gets you to convince a CTO that we need to have a team learn D ?
On the flip side, where are the 200k base salary D positions.
Get me an interview in 2 months and I'll drop 10 hours a week into learning
Off topic: Back in the day, C++ programming books Andrei Alexandrescu are a joy to read, especially, Modern C++ design.
Also, this presentation https://accu.org/conf-docs/PDFs_2007/Alexandrescu-Choose_You... killed a lot of bike shedding!
When I was student, our group was forced to use D lang instead C++ for CS2* classes. That was back in 2009. After 16 years I see that level of adoption did not change at all.
I was personally a lot more excited by D and subsequently Nim, but ultimately it's Rust and Zig that got adoption. Sigh.
I remember the creator of D programming Language replying to me on HN on one of my posts!
D is a treasure we should continue to cherish and protect
A language with sane Compile Time features (Type Introspection, CTFE, mixins, etc)
A language that can embrace C ecosystem with sane diagnostics
A language that ships with its own optimizing code generator and inline assembler!
A compiler that compiles code VERY fast
A compiler with a readable source code that bootstraps itself in just 5 seconds
People who dunk on it "bEcAuSe iT Is nOt MaInsTrEaM" are clueless
I never understood why this language didn't gain much traction. It seems very solid.
At the same time, I've never used it, I'm not sure why.
Anyway, the author of D language is here on HN (Walter Bright).
Sigh.
Ownership and borrowing are so much less baroque in D than in Rust. And compile times are superb.
In a better world, we would all be using D instead of C, C++ or Rust.
However in this age of Kali...
Serious question, how is this on the front page? We all know of the language and chosen not to use it.
Edit: Instead of downvoting, just answer the question if you've upvoted it. But I'm guessing it's the same sock accounts that upvoted it.
D is like a forced meme at that point.
Never has an old language gained traction, its all about the initial network effects created by excitement.
No matter how much better it is from C now, C is slowly losing traction and its potential replacements already have up and running communities (Rust, zig etc)
Oohh, riiiighttt, D is new(s).
Slow day?
IMHO D just missed the mark with the GC in core. It was released in a time where a replacement for C++ was sorely needed, and it tried to position itself as that (obvious from the name).
But by including the GC/runtime it went into a category with C# and Java which are much better options if you're fine with shipping a runtime and GC. Eventually Go showed up to crowd out this space even further.
Meanwhile in the C/C++ replacement camp there was nothing credible until Rust showed up, and nowadays I think Zig is what D wanted to be with more momentum behind it.
Still kind of salty about the directions they took because we could have had a viable C++ alternative way earlier - I remember getting excited about the language a lifetime ago :D