On 3/08/2015 4:25 a.m., Yura wrote:
Dear D coders/developers,
I am just thinking on one project in computational chemistry, and it is
sort of difficult for me to pick up the right language this project to
be written. The project is going to deal with the generation of the
molecular structures and will resemble to some extent some
bio-informatic stuff. Personally I code in two languages - Python, and a
little bit in C (just started to learn this language).
While it is easy to code in Python there are two things I do not like:
1) Python is slow for nested loops (much slower comparing to C)
2) Python is not compiled. However, I want to work with a code which can
be compiled and distributed as binaries (at least at the beginning).
When it comes to C, it is very difficult to code (I am a chemist rather
than computer scientist). The pointers, memory allocation, absence of
the truly dynamically allocated arrays, etc, etc make the coding very
long. C is too low level I believe.
I just wander how D would be suitable for my purpose? Please, correct me
if I am wrong, but in D the need of pointers is minimal, there is a
garbage collector, the arrays can be dynamically allocated, the arrays
can be sliced, ~=, etc which makes it similar to python at some extent.
I tried to write a little code in D and it was very much intuitive and
similar to what I did both in Python and C.
Any hints/thoughts/advises?
With kind regards,
Yury
Everyone else seems to be focusing on the technical aspects of why
choose/not D.
To put it simply, just have a go!
Write a small prototype.
- Did you enjoy it?
- Did it reflect what you were thinking well?
- Can others understand it?
If you need help, feel free to jump on and post on D.learn.
If you need more interactive help, come on IRC. We have a channel on
FreeNode and even OFTC.
