this has been a great thread and I've found a lot of the replies
very insightful. I've been programming in Go at work for about a
year or so now, so I have some opinions on Go that I believe are
reasonably informed, while I am still a D novice but hope to
continue learning.
First, let me say that it is obvious that, by design, D is a more
powerful language than Go. Go's simplicity will either be an
advantage or a deal-breaker based on who you ask.
On my vps instance last night I tried to create an initial D
programming environment, with the following tools:
- dmd
- dub
- vibe.d
- ldc (not strictly necessary but I've heard so many good things
about it)
First I tried installing dmd from source, which was fine but then
I would get strange errors about referring to a file "object.d"
when trying to build dub. Some poking around on the web resulted
in the advice of installing the pre-built dmd binary that is in
the release distribution. Now I was able to build dub, although
it was strange to see two completely different build mechanisms
for dmd and dub - dmd using a makefile and dub using a sh script
wrapper. vibe.d was easier to install once dub worked. Over an
hour just to get basic tools installed, although I feel HTTP
serving is so common that it should be one of the accepted
"batteries included" by default.
If this were Go, I would have installed the default build for my
platform and had an http server in my standard sdk and everything
else available by "go get", which has never failed to work
flawlessly for me in a year of dealing with code from the web.
This is one reason why there are already so many libraries for Go
- it is trivial to expose your code to other developers via the
supported toolchain.
This might not be a fair assessment given my shallow experience
with D, but it seems much less polished relative to Go for
setting up a development environment and working with code from
the web.
Go's tools can be criticized as precluding operating system
package managers, if people feel that criticism is valid, maybe a
solution is something like the Haskell Platform, which was a
reasonable response to the same criticism with haskell in years
back - that setting up a development environment with basic
consistent libraries was very painful. Haskell Platform does not
seek to preclude operating system package managers.
Anyway, I hope this didn't seem too harsh. I still am playing
with D and hopefully at some point in the future, package
managers will address some of these needs.
brad
