Walter Bright wrote:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8stcr/the_case_for_d/
Nice article. Here some random bitching.
> If you are patient, you'll find out that D has constructors and
destructors with which you can implement deterministic lifetime of objects.
Not entirely true. Andrei forgot that destructors, in many situations,
are not deterministic at all, because the garbage collector calls the
destructor when an object is finalized. Another easily fixable mistake
that makes life so hard.
> Other implementations are underway, notably including an a .NET port
and one using the LLVM infrastructure as backend.
Just that LDC (why not mention it directly?) is starting to become more
stable than DMD, while the .NET port is in an early alpha stage at best.
> In fact, D can link and call C functions directly with no intervening
translation layer.
Sure, but that makes the uninformed reader think he can use header files
directly. He will be disappointed when he finds out he has to translate
headers manually. (AFAIK there's no tool yet which does this
automatically with no user intervention required.)
> This low latency means you can use D as a heck of an interpreter (the
shebang notation is supported, too).
Now isn't that quite implementation specific. Maybe you should also
mention that dmd is not only fast, but also contains lots of bugs that
become issues in real life. So much for the implementation of the
reference compiler. (And sure, no doubt any language is easier to parse
and compile than C++. You could claim dmd's fastness is only a special
thing when compared to C++.)
> The basic idea is that D allows you to subtype as you need via alias
this.
Oh, so you decided to keep it.
> Variable-length parameter lists are also allowed.
Just not variable-length alias parameter lists or variable-length lists
of constants, d'oh.
> What takes things into space is the ability to convert strings into
code (by use of the mixin expression).
I think the reader won't understand at all what's going on. Why not
provide a simple example? int y = 1; int x = mixin("2+y");
> A better design has been blueprinted and the implementation is "on
the list," so please stay tuned for more about that.
(That was about reflection.) I think the readers of the newsgroup, where
future directions of D 2.0 are regularly discussed, would like to know
more about this.
> In D, the Boolean compile-time expression is(typeof(expr)) yields
true if expr is a valid expression, and false otherwise (without
aborting compilation).
Surprised to find this anti-feature mentioned in an introductory article
on D.
