On Tuesday, 21 May 2013 at 06:39:39 UTC, Peter Williams wrote:
On 21/05/13 16:21, Brad Roberts wrote:
On 5/20/13 9:49 PM, Peter Williams wrote:
Yes, if D aspires to be a systems programming language it
can't keep
relying on wrappers around C/C++ libraries (especially C++).
In the
long term, it should be D all the way down to the OS API.
You wrote this as if not using c and c++ libraries is a
predicate for
being a systems language. It's not.
It is for me. I also won't count D as a systems language until
DMD is implemented in D.
What's with the D community's (yes, I'm over generalizing some)
not-invented-here syndrome? Avoiding the incredible body of
existing
code out there that's accumulated over the decades is
foolhardy and
narrow sighted.
I did say "in the long term".
Are all c and c++ libraries great bodies of code,
absolutely not.
I am not a fan of C++ (and don't really trust C++ libraries).
I went to C++ from Modula-2 due to job constraints but
eventually ditched it and moved on to C - yes, I went from C++
to C. The main reasons were that I felt C++ caused more
problems than it cured. Plain C is a perfectly good language
for OOP as GTK+ demonstrates and there's no need for all the
complexity that comes with C++.
I went from Turbo Pascal to C++, with a very short stop on C.
Security exploits by design? No thanks. C++ might still have the
C security quicksand underneath, but at the same time it offers
more secure constructs.
Of course the best way would be to drop C and C++ altogether, but
it will take a few decades I would say.
--
Paulo
