by WalterBright 6 hours ago
> Zig particularly shines: comptime metaprogramming, explicit memory allocators, and best-in-class C interoperability. Not to mention the ongoing work on compilation times
The D programming language shines:
comptime: https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#interpretation
metaprogramming: https://dlang.org/spec/template.html#function-templates
explicit memory allocators: these are easily made, there's nothing special about them, I use them all the time
best-in-class C interoperability: Nothing beats D's ImportC, where you can import a .c file as if it were a module. You can even use ImportC to translate your C code to D! https://dlang.org/spec/importc.html
Performance: same as C and C++
You should probably say you are the core contributor to D!
We are fortunate in having a number of highly competent core D contributors!
What I meant is that it is proper etiquette to disclose that you are the creator of D.
Why D sees low adoption?
Good question, but I don't think this is the place for that conversation :) And I say that as a Dlang fan :)
Why would a comment suggesting to use D not be the place to have a conversation for why D doesn't see adoption?
You and Walter could do that, but this post is about some cool devs and their cool Zig project.
We could do a better job at marketing
Build the “killer app” that the audience wants and needs and where D is the best lang to do it and justify the investment in learning yet another lang. I have no idea of what that is and nobody knows, it’s the universal problem of any product/lang/tech. Right place at the right time I guess
A killer app can be built in any language.
Of course it can, but different killer apps for a different crowd. A missile tracking system wouldn't be the kind of application to do in PHP. Wrong app, wrong crowd.
I'm aware of D since it's inception more or less but don't know it very well. I would say D lacks a "bombastic" feature and maybe that's both the reason is not used more but also why is such a good language.
It's not "memory safe" like Rust, yes it's fast but so is C/C++, it doesn't have the "massive parallelism/ always-on" robustness like Erlang. It has a bit of everything which is good and bad.
Being a mid all-arounder is OK in my book, perhaps it's more a matter of some "post-AI" tech startup adopt it and get massive or famous, like Ruby because of the Web 2.0 era or Erlang with the Whatsapp thing.
Maybe D is good the way it is and will always be there.
too many features. tryhard vibe
We're implementing "editions" in order to remove some features that don't deliver enough value.
In part, the compiler wasn't fully FOSS until 2017.
The gdc and ldc compilers were fully FOSS around 2007.
We were able to get dmd's backend license fixed in 2017.
Ah, I stand corrected!
>Nothing beats D's ImportC
What does it offer over Zig's translate-c?
D does a pretty good job translating function-like macros, including creating lambdas out of macro expressions like:
#define X 3+y
ImportC can also import D modules, so C code can access the D code.