On Tuesday, 26 August 2014 at 05:58:36 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/25/2014 2:01 AM, Chris wrote:
The main thing that put me off Java was not so much the fact
that you're
restricted to OOP and that it's verbose etc., but that it
caused all sorts of
problems when shipping the actual programs. "Write once run
everywhere" is a
myth, if you ask me. D is much closer to that than Java. In
the end we
encountered so many problems that I dumped Java for cross
platform development
(and for development in general). Nobody in the Java world
ever talks about
this, but cross platform doesn't really work (apart from
running simple programs).
I haven't ported much Java code, but I have found D code to be
significantly easier to port than C++.
The varying sizes of basic types in C++ is what causes most of
the problems.
The problem was that Java didn't behave as expected on Windows.
Things that worked fine on Linux and OS X didn't work on Windows
(even simple things like deleting files). User reported all sorts
of problems, one of them being that the Java Access Bridge didn't
work. Why, nobody knows. The lack of a proper sound API /
library. Then there was the versioning hell with JRE/JVM and
having to tell users what version they had to download (the non
tech savvy crowd). I know that MS doesn't make it easy for Java
either. Well, I could have sorted the problems out with Java web
start, SWT and all that kind of stuff. Instead, I learned D which
I can compile and run on each platform without a problem.
In my opinion, if a technology like Java needs so many crutches
to make it work on different platforms, then it's useless for
cross-platform development. Also, once you need interaction with
the system or other (native) applications, then it becomes
frustrating pretty soon. D solved all these problems for me and
more, in fact it helped me to design a better product, because it
opened doors for me as regards both programming patterns and
interaction with the system and various libraries. That there are
other languages with which I could have achieved similar things,
I do not doubt. But I do doubt that it would have been so easy,
and the fact that new languages that aim for what D already
stands for are still being invented (cf. Nimrod) shows that
existing mainstream technologies like Java, C++, C# don't meet
programmers' demands yet.
