On Sunday, 24 May 2015 at 20:36:47 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Without wishing to dwell on the negatives of alternatives, might I ask what made you decide to settle on D? Do you have collaborators who write code and, if so, how did the discussions with them go about this? For your use case, what have been the main gains you have seen and how long did it take before these started to come through?
I'm not weaselcat, but I'm an academic and I also tried out Rust before using D. I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could ever expect any collaborator to use Rust. The syntax was crazy. The requirement to study memory management issues (something completely irrelevant) before even reading the code was a non-starter. It's just a complicated language that is not suited for the average programmer.
D is different. As long as I avoid templates, it's easy to read the code I've written, without any experience with the language. I tried C++ (Dirk Eddelbuettel devoted a section of his Rcpp book to an example I contributed), Rust, and Go. The other realistic alternative was Go, but I chose D as a matter of personal preference.
