"Jarrett Billingsley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 6:54 PM, dsimcha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
== Quote from bearophile ([EMAIL PROTECTED])'s article
D is a fringe language, and it's not an easy one (system language and
all that),
so there's never shortage of unusual people in this newsgroup :-)
Java groups are so boooring compared to this one :-)
Bear hugs,
bearophile
Do people seriously consider D a "difficult" language? Given that it has
garbage
collection out of the box, builtin arrays, etc. I would have guessed that
most
people only consider it to be of moderate difficulty. Yes, you *can* do
down-and-dirty programming with pointers, manual memory management, etc.
in it,
but you don't *have to* unless the nature of your problem domain would
require it
no matter what the language.
Or if you're absolutely obsessed with microperformance and attempt to
subvert the GC at every possible opportunity.
(Consider who you're replying to ;) )
It seems that bearophile basically wants a GP / systems language and tools
that are nearly as productive as the likes of Python but can also produce
blazingly fast code. A pretty worthy goal, and I think that was the orginal
blanket idea behind D anyway. To win mindshare I think D has to be able to
do better than more established languages in both areas.
Look at the time and $$$ spent on making Java "fast". Not a trivial subject.
Besides, there has been in previous years a good deal of initial interest
from members of two important groups where performance is vital: numeric and
game software developers. Over the years and more often than not it seems,
various members of both groups drop in to the NG's but end-up showing only a
fleeting interest in D. Most of the reason I think is because performance
isn't stellar, and even more that D (the language, as specified) doesn't
offer any advantage in that regard over the tried and true like Fortran and
C/++.
I don't think D will succeed without healthy backing from at least one of
those groups. After all, if you're developing a "high-performance" language,
customers of organizations who sell Fortran compilers, math and physics
libraries and HPC hardware are pretty desirable to have on your side..
So bearophile might be onto something there...
