On Tuesday 05 October 2010 20:16:41 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > On 10/5/10 17:27 CDT, sybrandy wrote: > > Just asking out of curiosity. With all the great language features, I'm > > sure that many of you have thought about this. > > > > For me, I figured a good start would be your basic Unix/Linux/BSD > > utilities, like cat and grep. I figure it may make the code easier to > > read and maintain as well as potentially improve the quality of the > > software. Of course, most of these are so old they're probably quite bug > > free, but some probably could use a rewrite. Some may even benefit for > > threading. > > > > Anyone else? > > > > Casey > > I wouldn't spend much time on rewriting classic utilities in D. There's > plenty to be done anew. One category of tools to be written in D are > utilities aimed at D itself (parsers, analyzers, Thrift bindings, > protocol buffers bindings, code for DB interface, etc.) > > Andrei
Indeed. It could be reasonable to convert existing C or C++ code to D if you're going to be heavily changing it, but converting pre-existing applications which are currently in C or C++, and which you don't need to maintain, seems like a waste of time. It _could_ be an interesting exercise in how to do things in D and could very well show shortcomings in D, dmd's current implementation, and/or shortcomings in Phobos, but then so would new applications. At this point, if I can choose what language I'm going to write something in, I'm almost certainly going to choose D (though obviously stuff like GUI apps may not really be properly feasible in D yet, and some things are just gonig to work better in other languages), but I have enough to do (and not enough time to do it) without spending the time to rewrite entire, working applications in D. - Jonathan M Davis
