On 06-Mar-2016 10:21, Shammah Chancellor wrote:
On Saturday, 5 March 2016 at 11:05:09 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
[snip]
Here's some stuff D shares with Go:
"Single" binary deployments.
Garbage Collector
In-language slices and maps
Foreach (Although D is much more powerful here)
Some things D is weak on:
* The name -- all I ever hear are penis jokes.
Thankfully not in my country ;)
* Garbage Collector (!)
This is indeed a sore spot, Go rapidly advanced their GC and even took
advantage of it being non-copying to deliver on lower-latency front.
Wonder if we could squeeze some more bang out of GC.
* dfix and dfmt aren't as good as gofmt and gofix. (And believe me I
understand they will be much more difficult to get to parity due to the
feature set of D)
Strangely people love single imposed code style of Go, and in many ways
other enforced conventions.
* Docs -- although these have gotten much much better recently -- the
current implementation of concepts makes it hard for people to know
where and when they can use a type. E.g sort docs
(http://dlang.org/phobos/std_algorithm_sorting.html#sort) How do I know
what types of things I can sort as a newcomer? Even if I figure out that
I need to look at isForwardRange, the docs there aren't terribly helpful
either
(https://dlang.org/phobos/std_range_primitives.html#isForwardRange) I
would put up a PR, but I don't know how to fix it without introducing a
language structure for Concepts -- but this has been veto'd for a
variety of reasons (primarily type explosion as I understand the arguments)
* Libraries
Probably the biggest issue. Another one I'd pull is complexity, there is
sooo many moving parts in D by now that we consistently fail to deliver
a feature complete spec and/or compiler for it.
Some things D is much better on (and would cause me to choose it every
time and just contribute fixes where I could to the external tools):
* Package management/build tools
* Integration with existing build systems/libraries
* Reusable algorithms that are FAST
* Empowering programmer expressiveness without enabling magic
Overall my impression is that if we were to compare D and Go as tools, D
would be more of meta tool - i.e. a tool to create tools whereas Go is
ready made toolkit that is nicely crafted but quite limited.
Now I only need to appeal to the former somehow ;)
-S.
--
Dmitry Olshansky
