Joseph Wakeling wrote:
Thanks to all again for the discussion, examples and explanations. :-)
[snip]
My needs are in some ways quite narrow -- numerical simulations in
interdisciplinary physics -- hence the C background, and hence the premium
on performance. They're also not very big programs -- simple enough for me
to generally keep a personal overview on the memory management, even though
with C++ that's usually all taken care of automatically (no new or delete
statements if I can avoid it).
What I'm fairly confident about is that, given not too much time, D will
become a _far_ preferable language for that kind of development.
There are quite a lot of us here with exactly that kind of background.
Something about the array issue -- D dynamic arrays are heavily geared
towards algorithms which perform an initial allocation and afterwards
avoid memory allocation entirely.
In D, such slicing algorithms are extremely clean, extremely fast, and
memory safe.
In C++, it's much more difficult to write code in that manner. A
straightforward translation from C++ will generally miss the benefits of
D arrays, and you'll end up with slower code.
A kind of "Zen of D" is to use array slices as much as possible.
