On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 02:01:33 UTC, Nick B wrote:
Yes I too would be interested on more background as to your opinion, as why its 20 years ahead of everything else out there.
Natively compiled: Moore's law predicts that the burden in advancements in computing speed will migrate into software. This may be enough to rule out increasingly the use of managed language for developments where cost is important and more than 1 server will be needed. Compiling vs interpreting can make all the difference between requiring 1000 servers vs 10 servers.
Template metaprogramming: This is the first reason I've chosen to use D in the first place. The idea that I could write code that writes code, and make it statically typed and safe. C++ has this but the errors are insane, the static if is not there, CTFE is just starting to pick up, there's no traits or very limited compile-time reflection (ie. static if(__traits(compiles, { some_operation(); })). The compile time is also much slower, there's simply too many legacy features in the language that have made it suffer in the long run. Even a package manager like dub is something nobody can agree on, because the community is so divided.
Overall, it would take decades for the most powerful language C++ to reach the current state of D in terms of compile-time capabilities. This is important because preprocessors are the only alternatives and they suck for larger projects.
I won't cover again everything that the dlang site can say about the language, and I could go on with how D has the entire web stack (I didn't release it fully yet) but that would be throwing myself flowers :P
