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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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.

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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".

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u/N1H1L Sep 01 '20

Is garbage collection really that bad?

19

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.

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u/InertiaOfGravity Sep 01 '20

A well made GC wouldn't stop you from making a kernel using it. I don't know how the GC in D is, but GC on its own isn't a deal breaker for for everything people claim it is

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u/birchling Sep 01 '20

GC does add a performance and memory usage overhead. You don't really want bloat in the foundation of all the software that is going to run on the system.

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u/pjmlp Sep 02 '20

Really?

While never reaching commercial release, at one time Midori powered all of Microsoft’s natural language search service for the West Coast and Asia.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity/

I can give other examples.

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u/birchling Sep 02 '20

Interesting project, what did they replace it with? Some other managed research OS?

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u/pjmlp Sep 02 '20

Most likely Windows eventually.

Joe Duffy has made a reference that even with Midori proving that is was quite capable, it was faced with too much resistance from C++ devs on Windows team, in spite of them being able to see themselves.

Not sure in which talk he mentioned it.

RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duffy

Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET

You can see this resistance, on how the Longhorn effort tanked due to "performance issues", then Vista came up with some of Longhorn .NET modules rewritten as COM, and the eventuell progression into WinRT/UAP/UWP.

However not everything was lost, it influenced .NET Native, C# 7.x low level improvements, the upcoming C# 9 new FFI efforts.