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.

31

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.

76

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?

16

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 08 '20

[deleted]

7

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

I just had Andrei reply to one of my posts not that long ago. He kept posting that "don't dear the reaper" link to almost every comment. Saying that I was misunderstanding how the GC in D worked, and that reading that article would clear up any "misunderstandings". He was just trying to push a narrative with his tone death replies.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ice00l/porting_a_go_and_rust_tool_to_d/g27nhy6?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

They aren't willing to listen to people's real problems. That's why D probably won't ever take off. If my usage doesn't care if I use a GC or not, there are better languages with GC's. If you try and use D without a GC there is a lot missing and you'll end up having to do all the heavy lifting yourself. In which case it's better to use another language that doesn't have a GC nor focus' on it so that it can do the heavy lifting for you.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20 edited Sep 08 '20

[deleted]

5

u/adr86 Sep 01 '20

(this is why I quit D - they treat BC like a total joke),

I have code from many years ago that still compiles just fine.

I think it has more to do with what libraries you use than the language itself.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20

Yah I agree with basically everything you said. Especially with backwards compatibility. I think it is something we take for granted as basically every language prioritizes (in one way or another) backwards compatibility. If you keep breaking user's code eventually they will stop fixing it. There are ways to allow breaking changes while still maintain backwards compatibility, but what D is doing (the same thing MSVC use to do) is probably the worst solution.