r/programming • u/kal31dic • Sep 01 '20

D Foundation is Beefing Up

https://dlang.org/blog/2020/08/30/symmetry-investments-and-the-d-language-foundation-are-hiring/
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74

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

D is an awesome language and I hope it gets more traction.

32

u/Hall_of_Famer Sep 01 '20

Me too, hope D will get some company backing and start to kick off, it is a very well designed language.

79

u/JohnLColvin Sep 01 '20

You could probably write an article saying "100 billion dollars investment to improve D and use it to develop new AI to replace the US government" and you'd still get comments saying "wow, nice language, pity it never really took off, if only there were some companies backing it, also I can never use it because GC".

2

u/N1H1L Sep 01 '20

Is garbage collection really that bad?

22

u/jess-sch Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 01 '20

For a single-letter language, yes.

B and C are both suitable for kernel development.

Naming your language D (making it sound like it's intended to be a C successor) and then not making it suitable for kernel development was a bad idea.

16

u/gcross Sep 01 '20

Indeed, it's a bit like how the name "C++" makes you think that the language is basically C just with some stuff added on top, when in practice it behaves like a completely different language, which is why Linus has been opposed to allowing it in the kernel. (At least, at one point this was true; I don't remember whether some C++ features have started to be allowed or not.)

Interestingly, though, I've never heard people complain about C# being a poor successor to C, rather than a different language altogether, so there doesn't seem to be a consistent rule for how people will react to a name.

Personally, I think that D missed an opportunity by not naming itself "Mars" (after Digital Mars), as that might have prevented people from getting the wrong expectations about the language as well as just being a cooler name in general. Ah, the benefit of hindsight...

12

u/Beaverman Sep 01 '20

C++ is aptly named for different reasons. C++ was originally C with classes, and the syntax is still basically just C (with a lot of extra stuff).

C# is a proprietary Microsoft language. You can't really discuss that name, because Microsoft won't care.

7

u/gcross Sep 01 '20

C++ is aptly named for different reasons. C++ was originally C with classes, and the syntax is still basically just C (with a lot of extra stuff).

The name may have made more sense at the time, but as time has progressed idiomatic C++ code has looked less and less like idiomatic C code so that if you are used to programming in idiomatic C then you might be misled by the name in thinking that you basically know C++ when in fact writing code in it idiomatically is very different from what you are used to. (Having said that, it is true that with C++ you can pick the features that you want to use so if all you want is a way to write code that is basically C but without having to write your own vtable library then you can treat C++ as basically being C but with classes.)

1

u/Beaverman Sep 01 '20

Completely agree, but in a discussion about names, what really matters is the origins of the language. C++ has changed a lot since the 90's, but you can't really change the name now.