On Tuesday, 26 February 2013 at 15:26:17 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh
wrote:
I am a novice D programmer and use C++ in my work. One thing I
find myself doing when I need to implement some non-trivial
algorithm is that I will originally code it in D and perform
testing from there to make sure I have the logic right.
Once I have everything working in D I simply port it over to
C++.
In my experience this porting is very trivial (it probably helps
there that I write D like a C++ programmer). While I don't have
hard evidence I think that the 'porting' effort to C++ is more
than offset by the productivity gains I achieve fighting with
C++
syntax while trying to get the logic right. Most of the porting
effort is simply copying and pasting the D code into my C++
source files and adding headers, replacing imports with
includes,
etc. Usually significant portions of the code compile without
any
changes.
I was curious to know if anyone else uses D like this. If so
this
might be a good way to try and get D into some C++ shops. The
nice thing about D in my opinion is that even for people without
D experience, if they have C++ experience they can likely 'read'
D code without much trouble (of course some features might not
map over so well - but the languages are syntactically very
close).
I can understand why you are doing this. C++ code tends to be
about 3x the volume of well written D code, so a lot of effort is
wasted when coding in C++, so if you can get it right through
using D, then translate to C++, you'll save a lot of time, but of
course we're better off using D directly, but first the language
and tool set has to be made production use ready.
Once full shared library support comes about, we'll be able to
integrate D libs directly into existing C/C++ code. This allows
for a safe migration path away from legacy C/C++ to D.
--rt
