8 ms·

D Programming Language

216 points by arcadia_leak 7mo ago

KnuthIsGod 7mo ago
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...
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Slowly it is going to be only skills.md. I agree with the sentiment, I really like D and find a missing opportunity that it wasn't taken off regarding adoption. Most of what made D special in D is nowadays partially available in mainstream languages, making the adoption speech even harder, and lack of LLM training data doesn't help either.
  - bigstrat2003 7mo ago
    > lack of LLM training data doesn't help either. That shouldn't stop any self-respecting programmer.
    - feastingonslop 7mo ago
      Nor does it stop self-respecting LLMs.
    - usrnm 7mo ago
      Self-respecting programmers write assembly for the machines they built themselves. I swear, kids these days have no respect for the craft
    - gigatexal 7mo ago
      Exactly. We wrote code before LLMs and we can after their advent too
      - pjmlp 7mo ago
        Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.
        tjr 7mo ago
        Is your proposition that programmers are now incapable of writing code?
        pjmlp 7mo ago
        Eventually yes, when incapable becomes a synonymous with finding a job in an AI dominated software factory industry. Enterprise CMS deployment projects have already dropped amount of assets teams, translators, integration teams, backend devs, replaced by a mix of AI, SaaS and iPaaS tools. Now the teams are a fraction of the size they used to be like five years ago. Fear not, there will be always a place for the few ones that can invert a tree, calculate how many golf balls fit into a plane, and are elected to work at the AI dungeons as the new druids.
        anonzzzies 7mo ago
        Same for ERP/CRM/HRM and some financial systems ; all systems that were heavy 'no-code' (or a lot of configuration with knobs and switches rather than code) before AI are now just going to lose their programmers (and the other roles); the business logic / financial calcs etc were already done by other people upfront in excel, visio etc ; now you can just throw that into Claude Code. These systems have decades of rigid code practices so there is not a lot of architecting/design to be done in the first place.
        tmtvl 7mo ago
        While I don't share this cynical worldview, I am mildly amused by the concept of a future where, Warhammer 40,000 style, us code monkeys get replaced by tech priests who appease the machine gods by burning incense and invoking hymns.
        gigatexal 7mo ago
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Self respecting developers are an endangered species, otherwise we would not have so much Electron crap. Those that learn to do robot maintenance, are the ones left at the factory.
  - baruch 7mo ago
    I work with D and LLMs do very well with it. I don't know if it could be better but it does D well enough. The problem is only working on a complex system that cannot all be held in context at once.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      I based my opinion on this recent thread, https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bvteanmgrxnjiknrkeyg@forum.dlang.org https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bvteanmgrxnjiknrkeyg@forum.dl... Which the discussion seems to imply it kind of works, but not without a few pain points.
      - baruch 7mo ago
        The complaints are against the open-weight LLMs, I didn't try them much. I do use mostly Claude as that's what the company is paying for. They don't pay for laptops with GPUs or locally hosted LLMs to test those. It's not like it knows perfect D, it does make mistakes and I don't work on a C++ or Rust project to compare its behavior. Generating templates from scratch is a bit of a challenge but given we have plenty of examples in our code with some prodding it manages to write well enough.
  - gmueckl 7mo ago
    My experience is that all LLMs that I have tested so far did a very good job producing D code. I actually think that the average D code produced has been superior to the code produced for the C++ problems I tested. This may be an outlier (the problems are quite different), but the quality issues I saw on the C++ side came partially from the ease in which the language enables incompatible use of different features to achieve similar goals (e.g. smart_ptr s new/delete).
- chhs 7mo ago
  For those curious what ownership and borrowing looks like in D: https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in-d/ https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in...
  - randfur 7mo ago
    I don't know D so I'm probably missing some basic syntax. If pointers cannot be copied how do you have multiple objects referencing the same shared object?
    - andsoitis 7mo ago
      > If pointers cannot be copied They can.
  - uecker 7mo ago
    Is there any experience on how this works in practice?
  - fooker 7mo ago
    This is a somewhat simplistic view of ownership and borrowing for modern programming languages. Pointers are not the only 'pointer's to resources. You can have handles specific to your codebase or system, you can have indices to objects in some flat array that the rest of your codebase uses, even temporary file names. An object oriented (or 'multi paradigm') language has to account for these and not just literal pointers. This is handled reasonably well both in Rust and C++. (In the spirit of avoiding yet another C++ vs Rust flamewar here, yes the semantics are different, no it doesn not make sense for C++ to adopt Rust semantics)
    - tgv 7mo ago
      How does Rust (or C++) treat array indices as resources? And won't that defy the reason to use indices over pointers?
      - fooker 7mo ago
- torginus 7mo ago
  OOP and ownership are two concepts that mix poorly - ownership in the presence of OOP-like constructs is never simple. The reason for that is OOP tends to favor constructs where each objects holds references to other objects, creating whole graphs, its not uncommon that from a single object, hundreds of others can be traversed. Even something so simple as calling a member function from a member function becomes incredibly difficult to handle. Tbh - this is with good reason, one of the biggest flaws of OOP is that if x.foo() calls x.bar() in the middle, x.bar() can clobber a lot of local state, and result in code that's very difficult to reason about, both for the compiler and the programmer. And it's a simple case, OOP offers tons of tools to make the programmers job even more difficult - virtual methods, object chains with callbacks, etc. It's just not a clean programming style. Edit: Just to make it clear, I am not pointing out these problems, to sell you or even imply that I have the solution. I'm not saying programming style X is better.
  - FeepingCreature 7mo ago
    I work at a D company. We tend to use OOP only for state owners with strict dependencies, so it's rare to even get cycles. It is extremely useful for modeling application state. However, all the domain data is described by immutable values and objects are accessed via parameters as much as fields. When commandline apps were everywhere, people dreamed of graphical interfaces. Burdened by having to also do jobs that it was bad at, the commandline got a bad reputation. It took the dominance of the desktop for commandline apps to find their niche. In a similar way, OOP is cursed by its popularity. It has to become part of a mixed diet so that people can put it where it has advantages, and it does have advantages.
  - arcadia_leak 7mo ago
    On the flipside, with OOP is usually quite easy to put a debugger breakpoint on a particular line and see the full picture of what the program is doing. In diehard FP (e.g. Haskell) it's hard to even place a breakpoint, let alone see the complete state. In many cases, where implementing a piece of logic without carrying a lot of state is impossible, functional programming can also become very confusing. This is especially true when introducing certain theoretical concepts that facilitate working with IO and state, such as Monad Transformers.
- fuzztester 7mo ago
  Kali Yuga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga
that_guy_iain 7mo ago
[flagged]
- anonzzzies 7mo ago
  even in this empty thread there are people who dont know it.
- aki237 7mo ago
  Genuinely curious as I'm relatively new compared to the time of inception of this language. Can you cite the reasons why people didn't choose D?
  - brabel 7mo ago
    It was competing with C and Java when it came out. People who like C will not use a language with garbage collection, even one that allows you to not use it. Against Java, it was a losing battle due to Java being backed by a giant (Sun , then Oracle) and basically taking the world by storm. Then there were also license problems in early versions of D, and two incompatible and competing standard libraries dividing the community. By the time all these problems were fixed, like a decade ago, it was already too late to make a comeback. Today D is a nice language with 3 different compilers with different strengths, one very fast, one produces faster results, and one also does that by works in the GCC ecosystem. That’s something few languages have. D even has a betterC mode now which makes it very good as a C replacement, with speed and size equivalent or better than a C equivalent binary… and D has the arguably best meta programming capabilities of any language that is not a Lisp, including Zig. But no one seems to care anymore as all the hotness is now with Rust and Zig in the systems languages space.
    - its_magic 7mo ago
      I had D support in my distro for a while, but regrettably had to remove it. There's just too many problems with this language and how it's packaged and offered to the end user, IMO. It was too much hassle to keep it around. To get it onto one's system, a bootstrapping step is required. Either building gcc 9 (and only gcc 9) with D support, then using that gcc to bootstrap a later version, or bootstrapping dmd with itself. In the former case I'm already having to bootstrap Ada onto the system, so D just adds another level of pain. It also doesn't support all the same architectures as other gcc languages. In the case of dmd, last I checked they just shove a tarball at you containing vague instructions and dead FTP links. Later I think they "updated" this to some kind of fancy script that autodownloads things. Neither is acceptable for my purposes. I just want a simple tarball containing everything needed with clear instructions, and no auto downloading anything, like at least 90% of other packages provide. Why is this so hard? Tip: pretend it's still the BBS days and you are distributing your software. How would you do it? That's how you should still do it. I haven't tried the LLVM D compiler, and at this point quite frankly I don't want to waste any more time with the language, in its current form at least--with apologies to Walter Bright, who is truly a smart and likeable guy. Like I said, it's regrettable. The only way to revive interest in D is through a well planned rebranding and marketing campaign. I think the technical foundation is pretty sound, but the whole image and presentation needs a major overhaul. I have an idea of how to approach that, were there interest. The first step would be to revive and update the C/C++ version of the D compiler for gcc so as to remove the bootstrapping requirement and allow the latest D to be built, plus a commitment to keeping this up to date indefinitely. It needs to support all architectures that GCC does. Next, a rebranding focused on the power of D without garbage collection. I'm willing to offer ongoing consultation in this area and assistance in the form of distro support and promotion, in exchange for a Broadwell or later Xeon workstation with at least 40 cores. (Approx $350 on Ebay.) That's the cost of entry for me as I have way too much work to do and too few available CPU cycles to process it. Otherwise, I sincerely wish the D folks best of luck. The language has a lot of good ideas and I trust that Walter knows what he is doing from a technical standpoint. The marketing has not been successful however, sadly.
4gotunameagain 7mo ago
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)
- kitd 7mo ago
  Python was first released in 1991. It rumbled along for about 20 years until exploding in popularity with ML and the rise of data science.
  - querez 7mo ago
    That's not how I remember it. Excitement for python strongly predated ML and data science. I remember python being the cool new language in 1997 when I was still in high school. Python 2.4 was already out, and O'Reilly had put several books kn the topic already it. Python was known as this almost pseudo code like language thst used indentation for blocking. MIT was considering switching to it for its introductory classes. It was definitely already hyped back then -- which led to U Toronto picking it for its first ML projects that eventually everyone adopted when deep learning got started.
    - kitd 7mo ago
      It was popular as a teaching language when it started out, along side BASIC or Pascal. When the Web took off, it was one of a few that took off for scripting simple backends, along side PHP, JS and Ruby. But the real explosion happened with ML.
      - trwired 7mo ago
        I agree with the person you're replying to. Python was definitely already a thing before ML. The way I remember it is it started taking off as a nice scripting language that was more user friendly than Perl, the king of scripting languages at the time. The popularity gain accelerated with the proliferation of web frameworks, with Django tailgating immensely popular at the time Ruby on Rails and Flask capturing the micro-framework enthusiast crowd. At the same time the perceived ease of use and availability of numeric libraries established Python in scientific circles. By the time ML started breaking into mainstream, Python was already one of the most popular programming languages.
bingemaker 7mo ago
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_Your_Poison.pdf https://accu.org/conf-docs/PDFs_2007/Alexandrescu-Choose_You... killed a lot of bike shedding!
kombine 7mo ago
I was personally a lot more excited by D and subsequently Nim, but ultimately it's Rust and Zig that got adoption. Sigh.
jakkos 7mo ago
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)?
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  More like the companies that jumped into D versus Rust, D only had Facebook and Remedy Games toy a bit with it. Many of us believe on automatic memory management for systems programming, having used quite a few in such scenarios, so that is already one thing that D does better than Rust. There is the GC phobia, mostly by folks that don't get not all GCs were born alike, and just like you need to pick and chose your malloc()/free() implementation depending on the scenario, there are many ways to implement a GC, and having a GC doesn't preclude having value types, stack and global memory segment allocation. D has compile time reflection, and compile time metaprogramming is much easier to use than Rust macros, and it does compile time execution as well. And the compile times! It is like using Turbo Pascal, Delphi,... even thought the language is like C++ in capabilities. Yet another proof complexity doesn't imply slow compile natives in a native systems language. For me, C# and Swift replace the tasks at work were I in the past could have reached for D instead, mostly due to who is behind those languages, and I don't want to be that guy that leaves and is the one that knew the stack.
  - deng 7mo ago
    > Many of us believe on automatic memory management for systems programming The problem is the term "systems programming". For some, it's kernels and device drivers. For some, it's embedded real-time systems. For some, it's databases, game engines, compilers, language run-times, whatever. There is no GC that could possibly handle all these use-cases.
    - amelius 7mo ago
      But there could be a smoother path between having a GC and having no GC. Right now, you'd have to switch languages. But in a Great Language you'd just have to refactor some code.
self_awareness 7mo ago
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).
erzhan89 7mo ago
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.
dhruv3006 7mo ago
I remember the creator of D programming Language replying to me on HN on one of my posts! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261452
- FrozenSynapse 7mo ago
  I had an interview at Facebook 10+ years ago and my interviewer was the other creator!
- jibal 7mo ago
  Walter's a regular on HN. > This very post is probably his too, under an alt :) The probability of that is virtually zero. Walter is a principled person, has better things to do, and his writing style is vastly different from the OP's.
  - abcd_f 7mo ago
    This very post is probably his too, under an alt :)
    - avadodin 7mo ago
      I was hoping to see one of his posts here. If he's going to post under an alt, he should advertise it so that I can know which posts I should be taking extra ironically.
      - jibal 7mo ago
        He's not posting under an alt--that's an absurd slander.
        avadodin 7mo ago
        Of course
WhereIsTheTruth 7mo ago
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
Rounin 7mo ago
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.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  GCC usually drops frontends if there are no maintainers around, it already happened to gcj, and I am waiting for the same to happen to gccgo any time now, as it has hardly gotten any updates since Go 1.18. The team is quite small and mostly volunteers, so there is the question how long can Walter Bright keep at it, and who will keep it going afterwards when he passes the torch.
  - schveiguy 7mo ago
    gdc is 100% Iain Buclaw. But he and Walter collaborate on needs for gcc compatibility, as long as Iain is around, gdc will be around. It is true we have a small team. But we are a dedicated team.
    - joecool1029 7mo ago
      > gdc is 100% Iain Buclaw So uh, funny story: I didn’t know this a few years back. GDC was missing the sqlite interface in GDC’s phobos. This made it so the dlang onedrive client and some other packages wouldn’t compile with it. Situation was like this for years: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/doevjetmiwxovecplksr@forum.dlang.org https://forum.dlang.org/thread/doevjetmiwxovecplksr@forum.dl... I eventually complained that it was easier to argue with Walter about politics on HN than get a library fixed on his programming language. Fortunately the right people saw it and it was fixed soon after: https://bugs.gentoo.org/722094 https://bugs.gentoo.org/722094
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      And was for several releases delayed due to personal issues, which is understandable in a small team among open source projects, however it is a problem.
skocznymroczny 7mo ago
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.
- destructionator 7mo ago
  OpenD added almost-full (you can't catch exceptions or spawn threads, so not really full, but the GC and such work fine) wasm support with like .... i think it was less than one day of work. wasm sucks though, what a miserable platform.
  - Defletter 7mo ago
    Why is WASM a miserable platform?
  - fuzztester 7mo ago
    what's the latest news about OpenD, anyone? I had read about the split (D vs. OpenD) recently on the Dlang newsgroup. Also, just had the thought that the split may damage Dlang's progress / prospects, for users, like the Phobos issue etc. stuff was supposed to have done. I don't know much about those details either, I had just read a bit about it earlier, as an interested light user of the language.
qualitylearing 7mo ago
[flagged]
999900000999 7mo ago
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
- arcadia_leak 7mo ago
  Well, I would say it's more like glasses - you can't convince those who don't wear them, and you don't need to convince those who need them either.
  - 999900000999 7mo ago
    What problem is D solving ?
    - arcadia_leak 7mo ago
      One good case for it that I see is a viable basis for cross-platform desktop apps. Today, cross-platform desktop GUI apps are either just a snapshot of the website contained inside Electron, or a C/C++ code base with manual memory management. D can serve as a nice middle ground in that space.
      - jpc0 7mo ago
        Where is the extensive tooling support for this use case if that is where you think it fits? Apple is all in on Swift, so you will not be writing native MacOS or iOS code for UI in D, best case you put your business logic in D but you can do that in any language which has bindings to swift/Obj-C. Android is all in on Kotlin/Java, not D again Microsoft is all in on C#, again not D. Linux your two best options for UI is GTK and Qt, C and C++ respectively. So the only place where you could bave seemless integration is Linux through FFI. Here's the thing though, for building a core layer that you can wrap a UI around, Rust has insanely good ergonomics, with very good third-party libraries to automatically generate safe bindings to a decent amount of languages, at least all those listed above and WASM for web. None of those uses cases are painless in D.
rafaelmn 7mo ago
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
- fuhsnn 7mo ago
  FIl-C, the new memory-safe C/C++ compiler actually achieved that through introducing a GC, with that in mind I'd say D was kind of a misunderstood prodigy in retrospect.
  - rafaelmn 7mo ago
    There's two classes of programs - stuff written in C for historic reasons that could have been written in higher level language but rewrite is too expensive - fill c. Stuff where you need low level - Rust/C++/Zig
    - brabel 7mo ago
      FillC works fine with all C code no matter how low level. There’s a small performance overhead but for almost every scenario it’s an acceptable overhead!
      - jibal 7mo ago
        up to 5x is not what most people mean by small.
        arcadia_leak 7mo ago
amelius 7mo ago
How good are the big LLMs at writing D code? Just curious.
- p0nce 7mo ago
  With Claude Opus I had no issues.
cocodill 7mo ago
D is boring, let's see how to recreate the B language: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpM-Dvs8t0VZn81xEz6NgO-L43EDL_AOv https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpM-Dvs8t0VZn81xEz6Ng...
small_model 7mo ago
Seen D being posted regularly on here, seems like flogging a dead horse. It's the equivalent of keeping grandma on life support when there is no hope.
- arcadia_leak 7mo ago
  You'd be surprised to see how active the D community is, despite your fair point that it's noticeably smaller than in the "competing" (in quotes because it's not a competition, actually) languages. The latest release [1] was on Jan 7th, and it contains more updates than, say, the latest release of Dart, which has one of the largest corporations behind it. 1. https://dlang.org/changelog/2.112.0.html https://dlang.org/changelog/2.112.0.html
  - schveiguy 7mo ago
    To be fair, the release cadence has been in a bit of a mess lately. But I expect that to be fixed soon. We don't want 6 months between releases.
lossolo 7mo ago
Years ago I got interested in D. It's a great language, but at the time its garbage collector was leaky. There weren't any D entries on the Benchmarks Game back then, so I ported most of the programs to D and optimized them as best I could as a newcomer. Performance wise, D was in the C/Rust/C++ range and in many cases it even beat Rust and C++. I tried to get the community involved to help the language gain wider adoption, but nothing really happened. I think everything has its moment, and D's moment has passed. They didn't make the most of the window when D could have gone mainstream.
- igouy 7mo ago
  > weren't any D entries fwiw nbody.dlang 2005 https://salsa.debian.org/benchmarksgame-team/archive-alioth-benchmarksgame/-/commits/master/contributed-source-code/shootout/nbody/nbody.dlang?ref_type=heads https://salsa.debian.org/benchmarksgame-team/archive-alioth-... Like 20 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060525101747/http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php https://web.archive.org/web/20060525101747/http://shootout.a...
  - lossolo 7mo ago
    Why it was removed a few years ago?
    - igouy 7mo ago
      Because: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/sometimes-people-just-make-up-stuff.html#maintenance-burden https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
DeathArrow 7mo ago
Every talk about D here seems to transform into "why D failed?".
- cb321 7mo ago
  I don't use D.. I find Nim helps with even lower ceremony. That said, it's hard for me to understand how "getting into gcc" is failure. The list of such PLangs is very short. People can be very parochial, though. They probably mean pretty shallow things (just one example, but something like "failed to convert me, personally", or "jobs I'd like to apply for", or etc.). Maybe people should instead talk about how they use D or what they'd like to see added to D? In an attempt to be the change one wants to see, I'd say named arguments are a real win and there seem to be some stalled proposals for that in D last I checked.
  - jibal 7mo ago
    D has named regular arguments and optional regular arguments. It has optional template arguments but not named template arguments.
- pjmlp 7mo ago
  Maybe because there were some expectations when "The D Programming Language" was published back in 2010, regarding where D would be 16 years later.
casey2 7mo ago
When design a language for everything nobody will use it for anything. When you design a language to simply accomplish one thing people will use it for everything. This is because people get the most efficient training using that simple language for one thing. From there it is only marginally more effort to carry some boilerplate. That "one thing" could be real or propaganda. Rust's one thing is writing "memory-safe" without GC. Eventually the marginal cost becomes too high or your are tricked by advertising and "graduate" from awk to perl. From there depending on the pull of the community or the actual utility of the language you will use it for more and more tasks. If the community pull is strong your programs start to look like line noise or boilerplate hell. If the utility for your problems is genuine they remain simple but you probably aren't producing the most efficient binaries. As for why c programmers don't just use -betterc well some do, but for most people the reality is that can just do it in c and prefer c -> c++ (ofc the vast majority of projects just start as c++ which makes -betterC ) c++'s one thing c with objects. If you learned to code writing Go what did you do? If you learned to code writing D what did you do? That's not to say you can't learn to code from writing D just that it discipline, most people don't even know a problem exists before they are already learning some language or tool, nor do they have the goal of building everything, most programmers are lazy they want to build the minimal amount and end up building everything by accident. Why don't experienced devs use D then? They think if they strive for ideological purity that they won't "build everything" next time, or they just enjoy ideological purity as it's own mental exercises. Unix faithfuls want to show that computing can be (conceptually) simple in implementation and use. Rust programmers want to show that those simple (to use) unix programs can be (memory) safe. To a senior engineer D is just too good and easy to take.
ivolimmen 7mo ago
I tried some D some time ago, it is a nice language. Given today's landscape of programming languages I think it's difficult to reason why a program should be written in D if there are more programming languages that overlap in features. Also depends on how fast you need to scale in developers, how quickly people can learn a language (and not just the syntax) so popularity is also important. I work in consultancy and this is what I always factor in for a client.
reeddev42 7mo ago
[dead]
fl0ki 7mo ago
There are two kinds of post on HackerNews: (1) Trolling Walter, (2) Other
fithisux 7mo ago
My only problem with D is that gdc does not work on Windows. I would be happy if they released it without phobos. Other than that it is excellent. DMD does its job.

216 points by arcadia_leak 7mo ago

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...

pjmlp 7mo ago
Slowly it is going to be only skills.md. I agree with the sentiment, I really like D and find a missing opportunity that it wasn't taken off regarding adoption. Most of what made D special in D is nowadays partially available in mainstream languages, making the adoption speech even harder, and lack of LLM training data doesn't help either.
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago
  > lack of LLM training data doesn't help either. That shouldn't stop any self-respecting programmer.
  - feastingonslop 7mo ago
    Nor does it stop self-respecting LLMs.
  - usrnm 7mo ago
    Self-respecting programmers write assembly for the machines they built themselves. I swear, kids these days have no respect for the craft
  - gigatexal 7mo ago
    Exactly. We wrote code before LLMs and we can after their advent too
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Yeah, that is why carpenters are still around and no one buys Ikea.
      - tjr 7mo ago
        Is your proposition that programmers are now incapable of writing code?
        pjmlp 7mo ago
        Eventually yes, when incapable becomes a synonymous with finding a job in an AI dominated software factory industry. Enterprise CMS deployment projects have already dropped amount of assets teams, translators, integration teams, backend devs, replaced by a mix of AI, SaaS and iPaaS tools. Now the teams are a fraction of the size they used to be like five years ago. Fear not, there will be always a place for the few ones that can invert a tree, calculate how many golf balls fit into a plane, and are elected to work at the AI dungeons as the new druids.
        anonzzzies 7mo ago
        Same for ERP/CRM/HRM and some financial systems ; all systems that were heavy 'no-code' (or a lot of configuration with knobs and switches rather than code) before AI are now just going to lose their programmers (and the other roles); the business logic / financial calcs etc were already done by other people upfront in excel, visio etc ; now you can just throw that into Claude Code. These systems have decades of rigid code practices so there is not a lot of architecting/design to be done in the first place.
        tmtvl 7mo ago
        While I don't share this cynical worldview, I am mildly amused by the concept of a future where, Warhammer 40,000 style, us code monkeys get replaced by tech priests who appease the machine gods by burning incense and invoking hymns.
        gigatexal 7mo ago
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Self respecting developers are an endangered species, otherwise we would not have so much Electron crap. Those that learn to do robot maintenance, are the ones left at the factory.
- baruch 7mo ago
  I work with D and LLMs do very well with it. I don't know if it could be better but it does D well enough. The problem is only working on a complex system that cannot all be held in context at once.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    I based my opinion on this recent thread, https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bvteanmgrxnjiknrkeyg@forum.dlang.org https://forum.dlang.org/thread/bvteanmgrxnjiknrkeyg@forum.dl... Which the discussion seems to imply it kind of works, but not without a few pain points.
    - baruch 7mo ago
      The complaints are against the open-weight LLMs, I didn't try them much. I do use mostly Claude as that's what the company is paying for. They don't pay for laptops with GPUs or locally hosted LLMs to test those. It's not like it knows perfect D, it does make mistakes and I don't work on a C++ or Rust project to compare its behavior. Generating templates from scratch is a bit of a challenge but given we have plenty of examples in our code with some prodding it manages to write well enough.
- gmueckl 7mo ago
  My experience is that all LLMs that I have tested so far did a very good job producing D code. I actually think that the average D code produced has been superior to the code produced for the C++ problems I tested. This may be an outlier (the problems are quite different), but the quality issues I saw on the C++ side came partially from the ease in which the language enables incompatible use of different features to achieve similar goals (e.g. smart_ptr s new/delete).
chhs 7mo ago
For those curious what ownership and borrowing looks like in D: https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in-d/ https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in...
- randfur 7mo ago
  I don't know D so I'm probably missing some basic syntax. If pointers cannot be copied how do you have multiple objects referencing the same shared object?
  - andsoitis 7mo ago
    > If pointers cannot be copied They can.
- uecker 7mo ago
  Is there any experience on how this works in practice?
- fooker 7mo ago
  This is a somewhat simplistic view of ownership and borrowing for modern programming languages. Pointers are not the only 'pointer's to resources. You can have handles specific to your codebase or system, you can have indices to objects in some flat array that the rest of your codebase uses, even temporary file names. An object oriented (or 'multi paradigm') language has to account for these and not just literal pointers. This is handled reasonably well both in Rust and C++. (In the spirit of avoiding yet another C++ vs Rust flamewar here, yes the semantics are different, no it doesn not make sense for C++ to adopt Rust semantics)
  - tgv 7mo ago
    How does Rust (or C++) treat array indices as resources? And won't that defy the reason to use indices over pointers?
    - fooker 7mo ago
torginus 7mo ago
OOP and ownership are two concepts that mix poorly - ownership in the presence of OOP-like constructs is never simple. The reason for that is OOP tends to favor constructs where each objects holds references to other objects, creating whole graphs, its not uncommon that from a single object, hundreds of others can be traversed. Even something so simple as calling a member function from a member function becomes incredibly difficult to handle. Tbh - this is with good reason, one of the biggest flaws of OOP is that if x.foo() calls x.bar() in the middle, x.bar() can clobber a lot of local state, and result in code that's very difficult to reason about, both for the compiler and the programmer. And it's a simple case, OOP offers tons of tools to make the programmers job even more difficult - virtual methods, object chains with callbacks, etc. It's just not a clean programming style. Edit: Just to make it clear, I am not pointing out these problems, to sell you or even imply that I have the solution. I'm not saying programming style X is better.
- FeepingCreature 7mo ago
  I work at a D company. We tend to use OOP only for state owners with strict dependencies, so it's rare to even get cycles. It is extremely useful for modeling application state. However, all the domain data is described by immutable values and objects are accessed via parameters as much as fields. When commandline apps were everywhere, people dreamed of graphical interfaces. Burdened by having to also do jobs that it was bad at, the commandline got a bad reputation. It took the dominance of the desktop for commandline apps to find their niche. In a similar way, OOP is cursed by its popularity. It has to become part of a mixed diet so that people can put it where it has advantages, and it does have advantages.
- arcadia_leak 7mo ago
  On the flipside, with OOP is usually quite easy to put a debugger breakpoint on a particular line and see the full picture of what the program is doing. In diehard FP (e.g. Haskell) it's hard to even place a breakpoint, let alone see the complete state. In many cases, where implementing a piece of logic without carrying a lot of state is impossible, functional programming can also become very confusing. This is especially true when introducing certain theoretical concepts that facilitate working with IO and state, such as Monad Transformers.
fuzztester 7mo ago
Kali Yuga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_Yuga

that_guy_iain 7mo ago

[flagged]

anonzzzies 7mo ago
even in this empty thread there are people who dont know it.
aki237 7mo ago
Genuinely curious as I'm relatively new compared to the time of inception of this language. Can you cite the reasons why people didn't choose D?
- brabel 7mo ago
  It was competing with C and Java when it came out. People who like C will not use a language with garbage collection, even one that allows you to not use it. Against Java, it was a losing battle due to Java being backed by a giant (Sun , then Oracle) and basically taking the world by storm. Then there were also license problems in early versions of D, and two incompatible and competing standard libraries dividing the community. By the time all these problems were fixed, like a decade ago, it was already too late to make a comeback. Today D is a nice language with 3 different compilers with different strengths, one very fast, one produces faster results, and one also does that by works in the GCC ecosystem. That’s something few languages have. D even has a betterC mode now which makes it very good as a C replacement, with speed and size equivalent or better than a C equivalent binary… and D has the arguably best meta programming capabilities of any language that is not a Lisp, including Zig. But no one seems to care anymore as all the hotness is now with Rust and Zig in the systems languages space.
  - its_magic 7mo ago
    I had D support in my distro for a while, but regrettably had to remove it. There's just too many problems with this language and how it's packaged and offered to the end user, IMO. It was too much hassle to keep it around. To get it onto one's system, a bootstrapping step is required. Either building gcc 9 (and only gcc 9) with D support, then using that gcc to bootstrap a later version, or bootstrapping dmd with itself. In the former case I'm already having to bootstrap Ada onto the system, so D just adds another level of pain. It also doesn't support all the same architectures as other gcc languages. In the case of dmd, last I checked they just shove a tarball at you containing vague instructions and dead FTP links. Later I think they "updated" this to some kind of fancy script that autodownloads things. Neither is acceptable for my purposes. I just want a simple tarball containing everything needed with clear instructions, and no auto downloading anything, like at least 90% of other packages provide. Why is this so hard? Tip: pretend it's still the BBS days and you are distributing your software. How would you do it? That's how you should still do it. I haven't tried the LLVM D compiler, and at this point quite frankly I don't want to waste any more time with the language, in its current form at least--with apologies to Walter Bright, who is truly a smart and likeable guy. Like I said, it's regrettable. The only way to revive interest in D is through a well planned rebranding and marketing campaign. I think the technical foundation is pretty sound, but the whole image and presentation needs a major overhaul. I have an idea of how to approach that, were there interest. The first step would be to revive and update the C/C++ version of the D compiler for gcc so as to remove the bootstrapping requirement and allow the latest D to be built, plus a commitment to keeping this up to date indefinitely. It needs to support all architectures that GCC does. Next, a rebranding focused on the power of D without garbage collection. I'm willing to offer ongoing consultation in this area and assistance in the form of distro support and promotion, in exchange for a Broadwell or later Xeon workstation with at least 40 cores. (Approx $350 on Ebay.) That's the cost of entry for me as I have way too much work to do and too few available CPU cycles to process it. Otherwise, I sincerely wish the D folks best of luck. The language has a lot of good ideas and I trust that Walter knows what he is doing from a technical standpoint. The marketing has not been successful however, sadly.

4gotunameagain 7mo ago

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)

kitd 7mo ago
Python was first released in 1991. It rumbled along for about 20 years until exploding in popularity with ML and the rise of data science.
- querez 7mo ago
  That's not how I remember it. Excitement for python strongly predated ML and data science. I remember python being the cool new language in 1997 when I was still in high school. Python 2.4 was already out, and O'Reilly had put several books kn the topic already it. Python was known as this almost pseudo code like language thst used indentation for blocking. MIT was considering switching to it for its introductory classes. It was definitely already hyped back then -- which led to U Toronto picking it for its first ML projects that eventually everyone adopted when deep learning got started.
  - kitd 7mo ago
    It was popular as a teaching language when it started out, along side BASIC or Pascal. When the Web took off, it was one of a few that took off for scripting simple backends, along side PHP, JS and Ruby. But the real explosion happened with ML.
    - trwired 7mo ago
      I agree with the person you're replying to. Python was definitely already a thing before ML. The way I remember it is it started taking off as a nice scripting language that was more user friendly than Perl, the king of scripting languages at the time. The popularity gain accelerated with the proliferation of web frameworks, with Django tailgating immensely popular at the time Ruby on Rails and Flask capturing the micro-framework enthusiast crowd. At the same time the perceived ease of use and availability of numeric libraries established Python in scientific circles. By the time ML started breaking into mainstream, Python was already one of the most popular programming languages.

bingemaker 7mo ago

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_Your_Poison.pdf https://accu.org/conf-docs/PDFs_2007/Alexandrescu-Choose_You... killed a lot of bike shedding!

kombine 7mo ago

I was personally a lot more excited by D and subsequently Nim, but ultimately it's Rust and Zig that got adoption. Sigh.

jakkos 7mo ago

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)?

pjmlp 7mo ago
More like the companies that jumped into D versus Rust, D only had Facebook and Remedy Games toy a bit with it. Many of us believe on automatic memory management for systems programming, having used quite a few in such scenarios, so that is already one thing that D does better than Rust. There is the GC phobia, mostly by folks that don't get not all GCs were born alike, and just like you need to pick and chose your malloc()/free() implementation depending on the scenario, there are many ways to implement a GC, and having a GC doesn't preclude having value types, stack and global memory segment allocation. D has compile time reflection, and compile time metaprogramming is much easier to use than Rust macros, and it does compile time execution as well. And the compile times! It is like using Turbo Pascal, Delphi,... even thought the language is like C++ in capabilities. Yet another proof complexity doesn't imply slow compile natives in a native systems language. For me, C# and Swift replace the tasks at work were I in the past could have reached for D instead, mostly due to who is behind those languages, and I don't want to be that guy that leaves and is the one that knew the stack.
- deng 7mo ago
  > Many of us believe on automatic memory management for systems programming The problem is the term "systems programming". For some, it's kernels and device drivers. For some, it's embedded real-time systems. For some, it's databases, game engines, compilers, language run-times, whatever. There is no GC that could possibly handle all these use-cases.
  - amelius 7mo ago
    But there could be a smoother path between having a GC and having no GC. Right now, you'd have to switch languages. But in a Great Language you'd just have to refactor some code.

self_awareness 7mo ago

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).

erzhan89 7mo ago

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.

dhruv3006 7mo ago

I remember the creator of D programming Language replying to me on HN on one of my posts! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46261452

FrozenSynapse 7mo ago
I had an interview at Facebook 10+ years ago and my interviewer was the other creator!
jibal 7mo ago
Walter's a regular on HN. > This very post is probably his too, under an alt :) The probability of that is virtually zero. Walter is a principled person, has better things to do, and his writing style is vastly different from the OP's.
- abcd_f 7mo ago
  This very post is probably his too, under an alt :)
  - avadodin 7mo ago
    I was hoping to see one of his posts here. If he's going to post under an alt, he should advertise it so that I can know which posts I should be taking extra ironically.
    - jibal 7mo ago
      He's not posting under an alt--that's an absurd slander.
      - avadodin 7mo ago
        Of course

WhereIsTheTruth 7mo ago

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

Rounin 7mo ago

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.

pjmlp 7mo ago
GCC usually drops frontends if there are no maintainers around, it already happened to gcj, and I am waiting for the same to happen to gccgo any time now, as it has hardly gotten any updates since Go 1.18. The team is quite small and mostly volunteers, so there is the question how long can Walter Bright keep at it, and who will keep it going afterwards when he passes the torch.
- schveiguy 7mo ago
  gdc is 100% Iain Buclaw. But he and Walter collaborate on needs for gcc compatibility, as long as Iain is around, gdc will be around. It is true we have a small team. But we are a dedicated team.
  - joecool1029 7mo ago
    > gdc is 100% Iain Buclaw So uh, funny story: I didn’t know this a few years back. GDC was missing the sqlite interface in GDC’s phobos. This made it so the dlang onedrive client and some other packages wouldn’t compile with it. Situation was like this for years: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/doevjetmiwxovecplksr@forum.dlang.org https://forum.dlang.org/thread/doevjetmiwxovecplksr@forum.dl... I eventually complained that it was easier to argue with Walter about politics on HN than get a library fixed on his programming language. Fortunately the right people saw it and it was fixed soon after: https://bugs.gentoo.org/722094 https://bugs.gentoo.org/722094
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    And was for several releases delayed due to personal issues, which is understandable in a small team among open source projects, however it is a problem.

skocznymroczny 7mo ago

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.

destructionator 7mo ago
OpenD added almost-full (you can't catch exceptions or spawn threads, so not really full, but the GC and such work fine) wasm support with like .... i think it was less than one day of work. wasm sucks though, what a miserable platform.
- Defletter 7mo ago
  Why is WASM a miserable platform?
- fuzztester 7mo ago
  what's the latest news about OpenD, anyone? I had read about the split (D vs. OpenD) recently on the Dlang newsgroup. Also, just had the thought that the split may damage Dlang's progress / prospects, for users, like the Phobos issue etc. stuff was supposed to have done. I don't know much about those details either, I had just read a bit about it earlier, as an interested light user of the language.

qualitylearing 7mo ago

[flagged]

999900000999 7mo ago

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

arcadia_leak 7mo ago
Well, I would say it's more like glasses - you can't convince those who don't wear them, and you don't need to convince those who need them either.
- 999900000999 7mo ago
  What problem is D solving ?
  - arcadia_leak 7mo ago
    One good case for it that I see is a viable basis for cross-platform desktop apps. Today, cross-platform desktop GUI apps are either just a snapshot of the website contained inside Electron, or a C/C++ code base with manual memory management. D can serve as a nice middle ground in that space.
    - jpc0 7mo ago
      Where is the extensive tooling support for this use case if that is where you think it fits? Apple is all in on Swift, so you will not be writing native MacOS or iOS code for UI in D, best case you put your business logic in D but you can do that in any language which has bindings to swift/Obj-C. Android is all in on Kotlin/Java, not D again Microsoft is all in on C#, again not D. Linux your two best options for UI is GTK and Qt, C and C++ respectively. So the only place where you could bave seemless integration is Linux through FFI. Here's the thing though, for building a core layer that you can wrap a UI around, Rust has insanely good ergonomics, with very good third-party libraries to automatically generate safe bindings to a decent amount of languages, at least all those listed above and WASM for web. None of those uses cases are painless in D.

rafaelmn 7mo ago

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

fuhsnn 7mo ago
FIl-C, the new memory-safe C/C++ compiler actually achieved that through introducing a GC, with that in mind I'd say D was kind of a misunderstood prodigy in retrospect.
- rafaelmn 7mo ago
  There's two classes of programs - stuff written in C for historic reasons that could have been written in higher level language but rewrite is too expensive - fill c. Stuff where you need low level - Rust/C++/Zig
  - brabel 7mo ago
    FillC works fine with all C code no matter how low level. There’s a small performance overhead but for almost every scenario it’s an acceptable overhead!
    - jibal 7mo ago
      up to 5x is not what most people mean by small.
      - arcadia_leak 7mo ago

amelius 7mo ago

How good are the big LLMs at writing D code? Just curious.

p0nce 7mo ago
With Claude Opus I had no issues.

cocodill 7mo ago

D is boring, let's see how to recreate the B language: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpM-Dvs8t0VZn81xEz6NgO-L43EDL_AOv https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpM-Dvs8t0VZn81xEz6Ng...

small_model 7mo ago

Seen D being posted regularly on here, seems like flogging a dead horse. It's the equivalent of keeping grandma on life support when there is no hope.

arcadia_leak 7mo ago
You'd be surprised to see how active the D community is, despite your fair point that it's noticeably smaller than in the "competing" (in quotes because it's not a competition, actually) languages. The latest release [1] was on Jan 7th, and it contains more updates than, say, the latest release of Dart, which has one of the largest corporations behind it. 1. https://dlang.org/changelog/2.112.0.html https://dlang.org/changelog/2.112.0.html
- schveiguy 7mo ago
  To be fair, the release cadence has been in a bit of a mess lately. But I expect that to be fixed soon. We don't want 6 months between releases.

lossolo 7mo ago

Years ago I got interested in D. It's a great language, but at the time its garbage collector was leaky. There weren't any D entries on the Benchmarks Game back then, so I ported most of the programs to D and optimized them as best I could as a newcomer. Performance wise, D was in the C/Rust/C++ range and in many cases it even beat Rust and C++. I tried to get the community involved to help the language gain wider adoption, but nothing really happened. I think everything has its moment, and D's moment has passed. They didn't make the most of the window when D could have gone mainstream.

igouy 7mo ago
> weren't any D entries fwiw nbody.dlang 2005 https://salsa.debian.org/benchmarksgame-team/archive-alioth-benchmarksgame/-/commits/master/contributed-source-code/shootout/nbody/nbody.dlang?ref_type=heads https://salsa.debian.org/benchmarksgame-team/archive-alioth-... Like 20 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060525101747/http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/d.php https://web.archive.org/web/20060525101747/http://shootout.a...
- lossolo 7mo ago
  Why it was removed a few years ago?
  - igouy 7mo ago
    Because: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/sometimes-people-just-make-up-stuff.html#maintenance-burden https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

DeathArrow 7mo ago

Every talk about D here seems to transform into "why D failed?".

cb321 7mo ago
I don't use D.. I find Nim helps with even lower ceremony. That said, it's hard for me to understand how "getting into gcc" is failure. The list of such PLangs is very short. People can be very parochial, though. They probably mean pretty shallow things (just one example, but something like "failed to convert me, personally", or "jobs I'd like to apply for", or etc.). Maybe people should instead talk about how they use D or what they'd like to see added to D? In an attempt to be the change one wants to see, I'd say named arguments are a real win and there seem to be some stalled proposals for that in D last I checked.
- jibal 7mo ago
  D has named regular arguments and optional regular arguments. It has optional template arguments but not named template arguments.
pjmlp 7mo ago
Maybe because there were some expectations when "The D Programming Language" was published back in 2010, regarding where D would be 16 years later.

casey2 7mo ago

When design a language for everything nobody will use it for anything. When you design a language to simply accomplish one thing people will use it for everything. This is because people get the most efficient training using that simple language for one thing. From there it is only marginally more effort to carry some boilerplate. That "one thing" could be real or propaganda. Rust's one thing is writing "memory-safe" without GC. Eventually the marginal cost becomes too high or your are tricked by advertising and "graduate" from awk to perl. From there depending on the pull of the community or the actual utility of the language you will use it for more and more tasks. If the community pull is strong your programs start to look like line noise or boilerplate hell. If the utility for your problems is genuine they remain simple but you probably aren't producing the most efficient binaries. As for why c programmers don't just use -betterc well some do, but for most people the reality is that can just do it in c and prefer c -> c++ (ofc the vast majority of projects just start as c++ which makes -betterC ) c++'s one thing c with objects. If you learned to code writing Go what did you do? If you learned to code writing D what did you do? That's not to say you can't learn to code from writing D just that it discipline, most people don't even know a problem exists before they are already learning some language or tool, nor do they have the goal of building everything, most programmers are lazy they want to build the minimal amount and end up building everything by accident. Why don't experienced devs use D then? They think if they strive for ideological purity that they won't "build everything" next time, or they just enjoy ideological purity as it's own mental exercises. Unix faithfuls want to show that computing can be (conceptually) simple in implementation and use. Rust programmers want to show that those simple (to use) unix programs can be (memory) safe. To a senior engineer D is just too good and easy to take.

ivolimmen 7mo ago

I tried some D some time ago, it is a nice language. Given today's landscape of programming languages I think it's difficult to reason why a program should be written in D if there are more programming languages that overlap in features. Also depends on how fast you need to scale in developers, how quickly people can learn a language (and not just the syntax) so popularity is also important. I work in consultancy and this is what I always factor in for a client.

reeddev42 7mo ago

[dead]

fl0ki 7mo ago

There are two kinds of post on HackerNews: (1) Trolling Walter, (2) Other

fithisux 7mo ago

My only problem with D is that gdc does not work on Windows. I would be happy if they released it without phobos. Other than that it is excellent. DMD does its job.