On Wednesday, 18 October 2017 at 08:56:21 UTC, Satoshi wrote:
Hi,
I had been using D for almost 6 years and I want to share my
opinion with you.
I don't want to blame anyone but I'll focus more on bad things
and possible improvements.
And this is just how I see D from my perspective.
(Sorry for my English, I'm too lazy to take the lessons).
First, D started as a great new language with the best from all
languages. But now D seems more and more conservative. New
syntactic sugars aren't added just because they can be found in
phobos. (this was Walter's answer when I asked for maybe monad
syntactic sugar).
OK, what I'm missing in D and what I think is wrong?
syntactic sugar for:
tuples
maybe monad (why we cannot have same syntax as in C#?)
conditional dereferencing and stuff about that (same as in C#)
foo?.bar;
foo?[bar];
return foo ?? null;
async/await (vibe.d is nice but useless in comparison to C# or
js async/await idiom)
I want to create function returning Promise/Task and await
where I want to.
e.g.
auto result = device.start(foo, bar); // This is RPC to remote
server returning Task!Bar
// do some important stuff
return await result; // wait for RPC finish, then return it's
result
I want to do this and not any ugly workaround about that.
@trusted, @safe, @system - why we have 3 keywords instead of
one? And why it's so complicated to use?
First, we should have one 'unsafe' keyword.
Second, everything should be safe by default.
3rd, if we want to declare @system func, use 'void foo()
unsafe;'
if we want to declare @trusted func, use
void foo() {
unsafe {
}
}
This fulfills the D's idiom in better way, because we should be
defining unsafe sections as small as possible.
C# properties instead of existing ones.
function and property should be two different things.
Calling function without () or assigning to it by = is a ugly
behavior and should be avoided.
implement this thing from C# (just because it's cool)
new Foo() {
property1 = 42,
property2 = "bar"
};
Reference counting when we cannot use GC...
Commercial usage, shared libraries and stuff
There isn't any handy tool to download, manage and publish
closed source stuff.
dub is great for simple solutions but useless in big projects
with multiple targets, configurations, etc.
Everything is primary focused on opensource development (but
everyone here wants to see D as a next successor of C++ in
commercial sphere).
Still cannot easily develop closed source dlls on Windows. On
Linux every symbol is public by default, but on Windows not so
it's needed to export them manually.
Unable to publish closed source library without workaround and
ugly PIMPL design.
Add dll/so usage without header files
(export enums, templates and stuff right into dll/so and let D
compiler to import these stuff from it)
For me, it seems like Walter is solving edge case problems like
return ref parameters and return functions but is unable to add
some basic stuff.
Thanks for your time.
- Satoshi
Interesting proposals, but IMHO, the only ESSENTIAL feature
missing in D is the possibility to program in D using a built-in
reference-counting based variant of the standard library.
If D really sells itself as a C++ alternative, then it MUST be a
true C++/Rust competitor.
So using stuff like strings, slices, maps, reference classes
should be made possible without GC.
You just need a few qualifiers to say if a class instance is
owned by a reference (behavior by default) or just pointed by a
weak reference (i.e a pointer with automatic deferencing).
That ALONE would make D a better competitor to C++ on its grounds.
Add full binary compatibility at the linker level with C++
library and you may now have a real opportunity to "win" the war
against C++ and Rust.
Or you can just wait that C++ improves enough (modules, etc) so
that D provides too few advantages to be an interesting
alternative...
