-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 bearophile wrote: > Luis P. Mendes: > >> I'm about to begin a project on artificial intelligence, decision trees >> and some other algorithmic stuff that needs runtime and development speed. > > Very good, D sounds fit for such kind of code. > If you need development speed (with good performance) you may also take a > look at Java :-) If you work on Windows (but you have said you use Linux) C# > gives some C++ interoperability, and its performance and development speed > are usually good. > I can give you some of the answers, and I leave the other questions to other > people: > >> 1) Can I access a PostgreSQL and/or MySQL database from D? Are there >> (fast/reliable) database adapters? > > There can be, but there's little that's really reliable in D :-) D is a > newish language, and it has very few developers (Walter, Andrei for the std > lib Phobos, and recently Don mostly for the as debugger), so things can't be > compared to languages that are backed by large firms (C#, Java, etc). > > >> 2) Is it easy to use C++ libraries? > > D is able to use C libraries, and a little of C++ (with D2, mostly).
No basically. the interface to C++ is extremely limited, you would need to be a very experience c++ programmer to effectively interface with any c++ library. > > >> 3) D compilers don't yet compile natively in 64 bits processors? Mine is >> a x86_64 Linux system. > > LDC has acceptable 64 bit support on Linux. But then you can't port code to > Windows yet. LDC is D1 only. > >> 4) I have to use huge (for me) amounts of data, maybe I'll make use of >> most of my 8GB RAM memory. Will I find problems due to any compiler/ >> language limit? > > I don't know. Not many people use D for large purposes yet. You can try, and > tell us. Tango developers may find ways to solve some of the problems you > find along the way. You'd have to use LDC I believe. Only dmd is D2 and that's 32bit, so you get ~3gb on 'doze. (what's the Linux version get you?) > >> 5) Besides Alexei forthcoming book, is there documentation for the whole >> language and not only to part of it as in http://compsci.ca/v3/ >> viewtopic.php?t=9518 and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A_Beginner% >> 27s_Guide_to_D ? > > There's the "Learning to Tango with D" that's mostly about D1 Tango. > > >> 6) Is D version 2 suitable for a beginner like me starting a new project? > > D2 is Alpha status, it's unfinished. It can be used but be ready for a rough > ride. It will change in future, so if you want your code to keep working 2 > years from now, you will need to update your code every few months. No it's not subtle for a beginner. You'll almost certainly hit compiler bugs along with a rapidly changing standard library. You need to be an experienced developer or just a very stubborn person to cope with that. >> 7) What advantages can I have in using Tango? Speed? Ease of development? >> will it be integrated as standard? > > Tango is often less buggy, faster, uses memory better (often no memory > allocations unless you want them), and gives you a lot more features. > Yeah, but you'll get educated in a crappy old style, object based library paradigm. Tango's design blows compared to template style libraries, though it's worth doing if you expect to become a Java programmer. - -- My enormous talent is exceeded only by my outrageous laziness. http://www.ssTk.co.uk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iD8DBQFK4KfrT9LetA9XoXwRAoQnAJsESM2q86Qov90DfS1tOWWa9Xqe5wCfUX6O lCrfsiOPGpJvL4l3/WVp6bA= =dTlh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
