On 09/12/13 20:45, Araq wrote:
That language X is faster than C in "practice" because X is much more developer friendly and thus you can tweak your code much easier etc. is an argument of every language out there.
Yes, but most languages (certainly most "friendly" ones) do not allow you to drill down into the details in the way that D does.
The claim that's made for most languages in my experience is that, sure, the language is ultimately slower, but the developer time saved is worth more than the performance hit, and if you ever _really_ need to gain that extra performance, you can always drop down into C. Of course, that assumption doesn't hold for some domains (e.g. intensive scientific simulation, games...) which is why C/C++ still has a significant presence there.
By contrast with D you get all that friendliness of refactoring and redesigning and extra time to experiment with alternatives, but in a language which is speed-wise on a par with C anyway; and if its higher-level constructs cause any problems, you can drill down to micro-management of your program _while still writing in D_. That's why D is very useful for heavy-duty scientific simulation and why unlike most other friendly languages it's a genuine contender for games programming.
