Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:04:55 -0400, bearophile escreveu: > Luis P. Mendes: > >> I'm about to begin a project on artificial intelligence, decision trees >> and some other algorithmic stuff that needs runtime and development >> speed. > > Very good, D sounds fit for such kind of code. If you need development > speed (with good performance) you may also take a look at Java :-) If > you work on Windows (but you have said you use Linux) C# gives some C++ > interoperability, and its performance and development speed are usually > good. I can give you some of the answers, and I leave the other > questions to other people: > >> 1) Can I access a PostgreSQL and/or MySQL database from D? Are there >> (fast/reliable) database adapters? > > There can be, but there's little that's really reliable in D :-) D is a > newish language, and it has very few developers (Walter, Andrei for the > std lib Phobos, and recently Don mostly for the as debugger), so things > can't be compared to languages that are backed by large firms (C#, Java, > etc). > > >> 2) Is it easy to use C++ libraries? > > D is able to use C libraries, and a little of C++ (with D2, mostly). > > >> 3) D compilers don't yet compile natively in 64 bits processors? Mine >> is a x86_64 Linux system. > > LDC has acceptable 64 bit support on Linux. But then you can't port code > to Windows yet. > > >> 4) I have to use huge (for me) amounts of data, maybe I'll make use of >> most of my 8GB RAM memory. Will I find problems due to any compiler/ >> language limit? > > I don't know. Not many people use D for large purposes yet. You can try, > and tell us. Tango developers may find ways to solve some of the > problems you find along the way. > > >> 5) Besides Alexei forthcoming book, is there documentation for the >> whole language and not only to part of it as in http://compsci.ca/v3/ >> viewtopic.php?t=9518 and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A_Beginner% >> 27s_Guide_to_D ? > > There's the "Learning to Tango with D" that's mostly about D1 Tango. > > >> 6) Is D version 2 suitable for a beginner like me starting a new >> project? > > D2 is Alpha status, it's unfinished. It can be used but be ready for a > rough ride. It will change in future, so if you want your code to keep > working 2 years from now, you will need to update your code every few > months. > > >> 7) What advantages can I have in using Tango? Speed? Ease of >> development? will it be integrated as standard? > > Tango is often less buggy, faster, uses memory better (often no memory > allocations unless you want them), and gives you a lot more features. > > Bye, > bearophile
Thank you all for your replies. I'd really like to do my project in D, let's see if I can find a way to do it. Luis