On Thursday, 11 September 2014 at 15:39:08 UTC, Sean Kelly wrote:
On Thursday, 11 September 2014 at 00:29:37 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
On 9/10/14, 4:16 PM, bachmeier wrote:
Clearly Walter and everyone should work on whatever they
think is important. I hope your statement doesn't imply that
all development effort is going to be put into C++
compatibility.
Ideally it would.
Is C++ interop really that important or is it another one of
those "if D had this, *then* I would use it!" dismissals. C
interop is clearly crucial. Operating system interfaces are
written in C, and not being able to call C functions is hugely
limiting. But C++? I honestly can't envision a situation
where I would actually care about C++ interop. Is this truly a
blocker for some people? Like an actual, honest blocker and
not just a false flag?
For numerical computing, C++ interop would be huge. Scientists,
statisticians, and economists don't want to write or even learn
C++, but currently there is little choice. Here are a few
examples off the top of my head:
- Rcpp is the most popular dependency in R. It allows for easy
embedding of C++ code in R.
- RInside makes it easy to embed R in a C++ program.
- Octave is written in C++ and extensions are easiest to write in
C++.
- Armadillo is a linear algebra library.
- Eigen does linear algebra, non-linear optimization, and
estimation.
- CERN's ROOT is written in C++.
No matter the claims about how much of an improvement C++11/C++14
are, the learning curve with D is much smaller. If you want to
make a newbie hate their career choice, tell them "you can do
that using Boost" or "that uses template metaprogramming".
