On Wednesday, 20 February 2013 at 00:15:00 UTC, David Piepgrass
wrote:
How is "looking" like C# relevant? D looks 90% like C++ too,
and D is still better. Certainly D is more powerful than C# on
the whole.
This is not a debate C# vs D. D is clearly more powerful than C#
with the current language semantics. But, once D will be adapted
to generate IL code, most of advantages will be lost. You cannot
have assembler code (may be IL code, but this can be achieved
using Emit in C# also), compile time reflection will become
redundant because of the intrinsic runtime reflection, most of
the templates will be constrained to generic types. In a
pottential D#, Phobos will not be used since you have the .net
framework. Also because of lack of some D features (like
readonly, mutiple interface implementation of the same method,
namespaces), more keywords will be needed to describe the code
and that will make it similar to C# more than expected.
The irony is the fact that digging in the forum history, you will
find how D has evolved to be more and more C# like. Just look at
the recent changes, "alias" has evolved to the exact syntax of
"using" from C#.
If the initial audience of D was the C++ programmer, I think it's
time to make a step forward and look also to lure the C#
programmer since the syntax is very similar. The most important
argument for the C# programmer to use D is the fact that D
compiles to native code. Offering something like D# to the C#
programmer is out of his interest, imho.
