Hi,
I'm a full-time C++ software engineer in Silicon Valley. I've
been learning D and using it in a couple of personal side
projects for a few months now.
First of all, I must start by saying that I like D, and wish to
use it everyday. I'm even considering to donate to the D
foundation. However, some of D features and design decisions
frustrates me a lot, and sometimes urges me to look for an
alternative. I'm here not to criticize, but to channel my
frustrations to whom it may concern. I want D to become better
and more widely used. I'm sure many others might share with me
some of the following points:
- D is unnecessarily a huge language. I remember in DConf 2014,
Scott Meyers gave a talk about the last thing D needs, which is a
guy like him writing a lot of books covering the many subtleties
of the language. However, it seems that the D community went
ahead and created exactly this language!
- D is very verbose. It requires a lot of typing. Look at how
long 'immutable' is. Very often that I find myself tagging my
methods with something like 'final override nothrow @safe @nogc
...' etc.
- It's quite clear that D was influenced a lot by Java at some
point, which led to borrowing (copying?) a lot of Java features
that may not appeal to everyone.
- The amount of trickeries required to avoid the GC and do
manual memory management are not pleasant and counter productive.
I feel they defeat any productivity gains the language was
supposed to offer.
- The thread local storage, shared, and __gshared business is
annoying and doesn't seem to be well documented, even though it
is unnatural to think about (at least coming from other
languages).
- D claims to be a language for productivity, but it slows down
anyone thinking about efficiency, performance, and careful design
decisions. (choosing structs vs classes, structs don't support
hierarchy, use alias this, structs don't allow default
constructors {inconsistent - very annoying}, avoiding the GC,
look up that type to see if it's a struct or a class to decide
how you may use it ... etc. etc.).
I could add more, but I'm tired of typing. I hope that one day I
will overcome my frustrations as well as D becomes a better
language that enables me to do what I want easily without
standing in my way.
- Thoughts about D IM via Digitalmars-d
-
