OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Tue 22nd Jul 2008 01:54 UTC

Walter Bright talks about D and his desire to improve on systems programming languages. Many successful concepts from other languages like JavaScript, PERL, Ruby, Lisp, Ada, Erlang, Python, etc., have had a significant influence on D, he says. He adds: "D 1.0 was pretty straightforward stuff, being features that were adapted from well-trod experience in other languages. D 2.0 has ventured into unexplored territory that doesn't have a track record in other languages. Since these capabilities are unproven, they generate some healthy skepticism. Only time will tell."

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RE: Bad experience with D

by renox on Tue 22nd Jul 2008 07:35 UTC in reply to "Bad experience with D"

Member since:
2005-07-06

Firstly, no distributions wanted to include the compiler in their repositories because of licensing issues.

That's true for dmd which you have to download yourself but there's no licensing issue for gdc.

Secondly, seriously, they told me that being unable in read files in /proc, /dev or other such linux filesystems is normal behavior

Well, these are not true filesystem, so I tend to agree that this is not really a bug that normal commands fails: after all a 'ls -l /proc/sys/kernel/osrelease' is lying to you by reporting a size 0, in fact it's silently failing..

But sure for a system programming language this is an issue, in my opinion the correct way to fix this is either to add an option to read so that it doesn't try to access the length of the file or to provide another function read_svfs (read special virtual fs) which does the same thing.

Sorry, its a great language, but there's too many issues. Mine was a very basic straightforward problem and nobody considered it a problem (and it was my first problem too)

Well, new system, new issues, this is true whatever the system (I remember having a bug in Java's GC back in the data), I'm not sure you really tried very hard to have this issue fixed, did you enter a bug into bugzilla?

There are very real problems with D:
-the incompatible split Phobos/Tango (worked on but has been an issue for a long time)
-the not very efficient GC (I'm not sure that this is solvable: this is a price to pay for C compatibility..)
-the syntax: it's better than C++ or Java sure (not hard!), but when you compare it to Scala, it's not that good..

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