On 23 August 2017 at 19:44, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote: > On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 13:12:04 Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d- > announce wrote: >> To coincide with the improvements to -betterC in the upcoming DMD >> 2.076, Walter has published a new article on the D blog about >> what it is and why to use it. A fun read. And I'm personally >> happy to see the love this feature is getting. I have a project >> I'd like to use it with if I can ever make the time for it! >> >> The blog: >> >> https://dlang.org/blog/2017/08/23/d-as-a-better-c/ >> >> Reddit: >> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6viswu/d_as_a_better_c/ > > I confess that I tend to think of betterC as a waste of time. Clearly, there > are folks who find it useful, but it loses so much that I see no point in > using it for anything unless I have no choice. As long as attempts to > improve it don't negatively impact normal D, then I don't really care what > happens with it, but it's clearly not for me. > > And it _is_ possible to use full-featured D from C/C++ when D does not > control main. It's just more of a pain. >
It's getting better, there are certainly some tough topics that need to be addressed in the compiler implementation. The GDC camp concurs with the sentiment of betterC being a waste of time. My particular stance on the matter is that it should not be an all or nothing switch, granular control is fine. The compiler should (and can!) produce a very small footprint whilst using the expressive richness of the language. For instance, a D project targeting STM board, makes heavy use of classes and templates, resultant code segment is 3k. https://github.com/JinShil/stm32f42_discovery_demo#the-good I quote the author here that when building the project, there is: """ No Stinking -betterC. If you don't want the overhead of a certain feature of D, don't use it. -betterC is just a synonymn for -worseD. """