Jacek Furmankiewicz:
Well, these are the types of questions I have as a Java veteran
who is having a first look at D after the recent Facebook
announcement.
By now I have a decent idea of where most of the new languages
(Go has same issues, for the most part) come up short when
compared to Java's very mature SDK, so that is usually where I
start probing first.
Sorry :-(
The development of the Java language, its GC, Oracle JVM,
standard library (and its IDEs, etc) have received tons of money,
time, and hours of work, so it's not strange Java is "better"
than D.
On the other hand different languages are fitter for different
purposes. I like D a lot, but programmers should choose languages
wisely, and Java is a wiser choice for several commercial
purposes. If you rewrite Minecraft from Java to D I suspect you
produce a game that's faster and with a shorter source code,
while keeping most of its programmer-friendly nature and its
coding safety, despite the current limits of the D GC.
If you want to use D try to find niches where it could be useful
and fit. I am using D where it's better than equivalent Java
code. Today Python is used a lot, but in many cases it's not
replacing equivalent Java code.
Probably you can replace some Java code with Scala code.
Bye,
bearophile
