On Sat, Dec 07, 2013 at 09:33:53AM -0800, Walter Bright wrote: > On 12/7/2013 1:45 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote: > >TL;DR the point is that writing in D gave me the opportunity to spend > >mental and programming time exploring these different choices and > >focusing on algorithms and data structures, rather than all the > >effort and extra LOC required to get a _particular_ idea running in > >C. That's where the real edge arises. > > I've noticed this too, but I've found it hard to explain to C > programmers. > > To say it a different way, D makes it easy to refactor code to rapidly > try out different algorithms. In C, one tends to stick with the > original design because it is so much harder to refactor.
D's metaprogramming capabilities and compile-time introspection help this a lot. Even little things like @property (in spite of the problems associated with its current implementation) go a long way in allowing two divergent implementations to share the same API, so that it's much easier to replace one implementation with another -- with no runtime cost. In C, once you've committed to a particular implementation, you can't easily change it without rewriting large chunks of code. While it *is* possible to do this to some extent using void* and function ptrs and so on, that would introduce runtime overhead, whereas in D, it's only a compile-time difference. To avoid runtime overhead you'd have to make heavy use of macros, which quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare. T -- Never step over a puddle, always step around it. Chances are that whatever made it is still dripping.
