On Sunday, 2 August 2015 at 16:25:18 UTC, Yura wrote:
Dear D coders/developers,
I am just thinking on one project in computational chemistry,
and it is sort of difficult for me to pick up the right
language this project to be written. The project is going to
deal with the generation of the molecular structures and will
resemble to some extent some bio-informatic stuff. Personally I
code in two languages - Python, and a little bit in C (just
started to learn this language).
While it is easy to code in Python there are two things I do
not like:
1) Python is slow for nested loops (much slower comparing to C)
2) Python is not compiled. However, I want to work with a code
which can be compiled and distributed as binaries (at least at
the beginning).
When it comes to C, it is very difficult to code (I am a
chemist rather than computer scientist). The pointers, memory
allocation, absence of the truly dynamically allocated arrays,
etc, etc make the coding very long. C is too low level I
believe.
I just wander how D would be suitable for my purpose? Please,
correct me if I am wrong, but in D the need of pointers is
minimal, there is a garbage collector, the arrays can be
dynamically allocated, the arrays can be sliced, ~=, etc which
makes it similar to python at some extent. I tried to write a
little code in D and it was very much intuitive and similar to
what I did both in Python and C.
Any hints/thoughts/advises?
With kind regards,
Yury
I'd say go for it. My experience with D is that you can use it
both for fast (to write and execute) scripts and for large
enterprise applications. You can certainly view it as a easier
version of C, though it can offer a lot more if you need it. 90%
of the syntax is the same as C, so there shouldn't be gotchas in
the basic stuff.
Recently at DConf [1] John Colvin gave a talk [2] about using D
for science which will probably be interesting for you.
Good luck :)
[1]: http://dconf.org/2015/schedule/index.html
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edjrSDjkfko D Is For Science
